Chuck vs the Sunken Treasure
by ninjaVanish
Summary: AU: When the 'R7' gaming laptop prototype is lost at sea, Chuck is sent to oversee the recovery, which is being contracted to Walker Marine Salvage out of Manila. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty. In this story: scuba diving, pirates, and bikinis.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: Okay, weird story. I got hit by a random story particle earlier this week, when I was working on Chuck vs the Frontier, and I haven't been able to work on anything else since. So, in order to get it out of my brain, here's this. It'll be a lot shorter than _Themselves_ and _Frontier_, maybe about as long as _vs the Bunker_, but that's just a guesstimate at this point; it could go shorter, but probably not longer. And it's a pretty drastic AU, but whatever; please, read, review, and above all, have fun. Hopefully, writing whatever is coming easiest will let me break through the block on Chuck vs. the Frontier.

Chuck vs. The Sunken Treasure

Chapter 1:

"Chuck, come on in," Mr. Roark said, throwing wide the brushed metal door to his huge office. The CEO of Roark Instruments ushered Chuck across the polished floor to the huge glass and chrome desk. "Come on, sit. Sit!" Everything in the room was metal or glass, and there was a floor-to-ceiling window showing off an amazing view of downtown LA. Chuck swallowed nervously and followed 'Teddy' as he insisted he be called most of the time. Other times, usually right before you got fired, he would insist on 'Mr. Roark,' or so the gossip at Roark Instruments headquarters went.

Chuck was sweating through his suit he was so nervous. It was the first time he'd as much as spoken to the big boss even though he'd started at the company six years ago. He'd gotten a kind of pro-forma attaboy memo from the man on four occasions, when his code had helped the projects he was working on come in on time and under budget, but it'd never enough to earn him a face to face, and Chuck wasn't even sure if the man had ever actually read any of those memos. Bartowski wasn't exactly a name one ran across everyday, and his father hadn't exactly had glowing things to say about Teddy Roark before his disappearance.

Mr. Roark— no, Teddy, Chuck corrected himself, took a seat in an imposing and probably really uncomfortable leather and chrome seating-contraption. Chuck couldn't bring himself to call it a chair. Teddy gestured again. "Sit," it wasn't really a request, so Chuck sat, despite the reservations he had about his own, slightly smaller, though no less intimidating seating contraption.

He bounced a little, on what felt like hidden springs, but the contraption was far less uncomfortable than he expected. "Uh... Chuck said. "You're not going to fire me, are you?"

Teddy looked stunned. "Fire you? What—why would I fire you? You're one of my best programmers. No, you're definitely not _fired_! Chuck, this is a promotion meeting."

Chuck rocked back in his 'not-quite-a-chair' trying to keep the shock from oozing out of his pores onto his face to join the nervous sweat that was rapidly turning his face into a sheet of ice in the near-arctic air conditioning. "Uh..." he said again. "I didn't know I was up for a promotion."

"Well, you're not," Teddy said, but then grinned. "I just found out we know each other."

"Wait, just found out?" Chuck said. Apparently he didn't read all the memos he put his name to. "And how do we know each other?" It was worth a shot.

"Your dad!" he said. "Didn't your dad tell you? We went to college together! Used to be roommies if you can believe that! How is Stephen? I've got to have you and him and..." he glanced down at a folder. "Your sister over to my place for dinner one of these days."

"Oh," Chuck said. Great, nepotism. Not the 'willing to sabotage me at every turn' like dad said of the man. That was both a relief, and a bit of a disappointment. Sometimes he wished for the excitement that having an actual enemy might bring. "I don't think that's a good idea."

Teddy scowled briefly. "It wasn't exactly a request."

"No, I'm not..." Chuck started. "I don't know where my dad _is_. My sister and I, we haven't spoken to him in years. He used to send Christmas cards, but, a few years back they just stopped." Chuck nursed a fear that his job working for Roark Instruments had had something to do with that, but he left it unsaid, and was glad of it.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Teddy said, voice dripping with sincerity. "Really, truly sorry. I'd hoped we could meet up and talk about old times."

"Sir, I'd rather not get a promotion just because you knew my father." Chuck said, trying to change the subject. "I think my work speaks for itself, and there's a spot opening up to head the bug-fixing team for RI-OS next year, that I've applied for, but..."

"Consider it yours, when the time comes," he said. "And call me Teddy."

Chuck grimaced. "I don't want special treatment...Teddy."

"It's my company," Mr. Roark said. "And I say, you're taking this promotion, and the other thing too. You fly out tomorrow."

"Fly out?" Chuck said. "What? Where?"

"Wanna try to fit in 'Who, when and why?" Teddy chuckled. "It's basically a working vacation, Chuck." He flapped the folder to demonstrate. "It says here you've been letting your unused leave roll over into a fat bonus check every year. Which is all well and good, I admire industriousness in my employees Chuck, but four years? Go out, live it up a little."

Chuck fought down a scowl. So what if he didn't have much of a social life? That money was going to a good cause; Bartowski Enterprises needed all the start-up capital he could get if he wanted to graduate from his tiny iPhone app sideline into a viable company. Chuck had briefly hired a lawyer, who'd told him the 'no compete' clause in his employment contract with RI didn't apply, and he intended to ride that loophole for all it was worth and take a nice chuck of the market share with him when he did. Maybe the Christmas cards from his father would start showing up again when that happened, but Chuck wasn't doing it for that reason, he wanted to make a name for himself, and doing so at Roark's expense was just a little icing on the cake. "Sir, I don't—" he never got any farther than that.

"Teddy," Roark insisted, sliding a plane ticket across his glass desk. "And I insist. I'll have my executive assistant explain further. Johnny my lad? Get in here. Sorry, Chuck. But I've really _got _to run. They're waiting for me at the helipad."

Teddy swept out. It wasn't a rush, but it still left Chuck's mind reeling in its wake. What the _hell_ was going on?

"I've seen that look before," a gruff voice said behind him, and Chuck turned. "Teddy can be a little overwhelming at first." From the way Roark had spoken into the intercom for his 'executive assistant,' Chuck had been expecting... something different from the reality of 'Johnny my lad.' The man was a good inch or so taller than Chuck's slim six foot three, and probably had at least fifty pounds of muscle on him to boot. Chuck blinked in a misguided attempt to banish the mirage. He looked more like an NFL linebacker than a glorified secretary, but Chuck was smart enough not to say so; there was something about the way the man held himself that screamed dangerous.

The man grinned as if he could read Chuck's thoughts. "Here," he said, handing over a folder. "Pack some swim trunks, I hear Manilla is warm this time of year. Well, technically, its warm all the time, but..."

"Manilla, as in, the Phillipines?" Chuck said, and his voice broke. Johnny grunted a laugh.

"No Manilla like the envelopes," he said.

Chuck blinked. "Actually, that's where they got the name from," he said. "It's really kind of interesting if..."

Roark's executive assistant put up a hand to stop the babble. "I don't have time to listen to your jibber-jabber," the man said. "It's a pretty simple assignment. You're now the Interim Project Manager for Southeast Asian Data Throughput and Recovery."

"Wow, even the acronym for that's a mouthful. IPMSADTR," Chuck said, trying to make the weird combination of letters into an actual word.

Johnny rolled his eyes. "Cram it, Bartowski."

"You're awfully rude for a glorified secretary," Chuck shot back.

Johnny the secretary growled deep in the back of his throat, and his eyes narrowed enough that Chuck took an involuntary step back. The man grunted, as if satisfied with that reaction. "The official story is that you're going to oversee some new fiber-optic cable that we need laid under water for the next phase of the RIOS 10 launch, and you will be doing a little of that, but we've got people already in the area. What's really happening, is a plane carrying the new Roark 7 prototype went down in the area, and we've hired a local salvage company to retrieve it. You're going to be on the boat to make sure nobody swipes anything, and bring back the remains of the thing."

Chuck's eyes had widened steadily the entire time Johnny the secretary had spoken, so that by the time the man was finished, Chuck was afraid they'd fall out and roll around on the floor. "The R7 is finished? I thought the specs weren't going to be final until march!" Chuck buried his nose in the folder he'd been given, which had detailed specifications for the laptop. "This is so awesome, see you!" He made his way for the door, nearly bumping into the brushed steel portal because he wasn't watching where he was going.

Johnny rolled his eyes again, and shook his head once the nerd had entered the elevator. "Sure, that's where his mind goes. The busted gaming laptop on the bottom of the ocean. Ignoring the fact that he'll be in an exotic location, on what amounts to a treasure hunting ship." He sighed and went back to his desk. With Roark out of the office, John Casey started typing up his report to his_ real_ employers. Something fishy was going on, and he figured it deserved a query, to see if CIA had any ops running in the area. NSA knew Roark was dirty, but just couldn't prove it yet, hence Casey's assignment. He prayed he'd finally be able to steal Roark's encryption protocols today, with his 'boss' out of the office. He wasn't sure he could take another two weeks of this nerd infested hellhole, as the operation demanded.

Chuck clocked out early. Or tried to, his direct supervisor stopped him and handed him a black plastic card "What's this, Alan?"

The older programmer shook his head. "Your corporate Black Amex," he explained. "For the next week, apparently, you're on round-the-clock overtime, _and_ on the company expense account."

Chuck stared at the credit card in his hand. "Do _what?" _he managed to get out after a moment where he thought he was about to start hyperventilating.

Alan shrugged. "I'm just following orders. Teddy's orders."

"So, wait, Do I need to get receipts or what?"

"No," Alan said, his envy starting to creep in. "The guidelines are right here, and I had a look at them. Whoever it was you slept with to get this promotion Bartowski, give me his number, I'll go for it."

Chuck rolled his eyes. "I'm not gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just because I've been having a bit of a dry spell, doesn't mean—"

"Hey, man, Five year's isn't a dry spell, it's a closet door waiting to open. It's the twenty-first century and this is California, after all. And I'm not one to judge." Chuck scowled harder, and Alan tapped the card in Chuck's hand. "Whatever. Basically, as long as you don't buy a car, you're covered on this trip, you lucky bastard. Come on, what gives? Why'd Teddy give you such a plush gig?"

Chuck sighed; might as well tell the truth. "My dad went to college with Teddy," he said. "I didn't mention it in my interviews or anything. I didn't want to trade on my dad's name, and it took Teddy this long to figure it out, looks like. I remember my dad saying he thought Roark cheated off him on a test their junior year."

Alan grinned. "Ah payola, what a wonderful word. Take plenty of sunscreen, you lucky son of a pasty-faced bitch." All of his co-workers echoed that sentiment, (up to and including the pasty-faced comment) and Chuck was nursing a bit of a tender spot between his shoulder blades from all the pats on the back by the time he made it down to his car in the parking garage. He didn't see the man lurking behind a nearby car, or the GPS he'd slipped onto the rear bumper of his car moments earlier.

Chuck fished his phone out of his pocket and called up Ellie as he made his way up the ramp to street level. When he told her the news, the squeal nearly ruined his hearing in that ear. Chuck pulled the phone out to arm's length until she was finished, so he could finish inviting her and Devon out to dinner, on Roark Industries' dime.

The next morning, Chuck didn't exactly feel lucky. The prospect of free booze had been too much for him, and he'd drank too much, and now his head was pounding and he was late for his flight, and the TSA agent was giving his laptop the scrutiny one normally saw with tactical nuclear weapons, or so Chuck imagined.

"Come on, I'm running late," Chuck said.  
>"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to stand back while we work," the man said, holding up his hand to stop Chuck from, what? Grabbing his computer and running? Chuck shook his head.<p>

"If you'd just tell me what the problem is, I can—"

"Sir, please," the man said. "Let us do our job. This is a random check as required by law."

Chuck grumbled and crossed his arms over his chest. They took a screw-driver to the back of his laptop, and Chuck's eyes widened. "Hey, you can't do that! You're not wearing a grounding bracelet, you're going to mess up my gear!" Chuck protested.

"We know what we're doing, Mr..." he read it off Chuck's boarding pass. "Bartowski, please, stay behind the yellow line."

Chuck fumed quietly and tried to go up on his tiptoes and peer around the TSA agent holding him back to see what these monsters were doing to his laptop. He wasn't having much luck, since the man was actually a little taller than Chuck himself. After several seemingly endless minutes they were done, and ushered him on. Chuck took the time as he was putting his shoes back on to boot up his laptop and make sure they hadn't messed anything up. He breathed a sigh of relief when his full system diagnostic came back green. He'd written the program himself, and if the TSA had so much as put one screw back wrong, it would have showed up. He didn't think to check for additions to his hardware.

He slipped the laptop back into his messenger bag and made a beeline for his gate, where they were sounding the final boarding call as he rushed up to the gate, and he just made it aboard before the crew sealed the door.

Back at the security checkpoint, the TSA agent headed off for his cigarette break. Once out of earshot and out of sight of his fellow employees, he pulled out a cellphone, and did something very odd. He attached a scrambler unit and dialed a number somewhere in Virginia. "This is Coldfish, reporting condition green. GPS tracker and key-logger are in place."

"Good," Arthur Graham said on the other end of the secure line. "Nice work Agent Shaw; keep this up, and maybe I'll let you back in the field somewhere more demanding than the Burbank Airport."

TO BE CONTINUED...

A/N: And yes, that's the last we'll be seeing of Shaw: seconded to TSA for incompetence. We'll see how often I can update this story. I'm in the middle of a move, which is eating into my writing time like you wouldn't believe.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Moving right along.

* * *

><p>Chapter 2:<p>

Chuck managed to drag himself out of the hotel bed the next day at something approaching the time he and Walker Marine Salvage agreed upon via email. Just not the agreed upon time for him to wake up. His eyes opened almost to the minute when he was supposed to be showing up at the Marina, but due to his still extreme case of jetlag, Chuck staggered to the bathroom without looking at the alarm clock. After leisurely showering and fixing himself a pot of coffee with bottled water from the little mini refrigerator (His Roark Instruments travel pamphlet suggested against drinking the local water, even though 90-some-odd million filipinos seemed to drink it problem-free everyday.)

Chuck sat down with his laptop and checked his email. He shook his head in consternation. Right at the top of his inbox was a message from _Bryce _freaking _Larkin_! The man who had stolen his girlfriend and nearly succeeded at framing him for cheating. He scowled and resolved to delete the damn thing unread, until he spotted the attached file, and more importantly, the file format: .zrk.

It was far enough out of the ordinary that Bryce had sent him a freaking _Zork _file that he was intrigued in spite of himself.

He opened the attachment and grinned as a text window opened, with a familiar line of Zork narration. He hadn't played the old text-based game since Stanford, and he couldn't remember at first how he was supposed to vanquish the Troll. Chuck frowned and rested his chin on his fist like Rodin's the Thinker.

A banging on his hotel room door took him out of the moment. "Chuck Bartowski? Please don't be dead in there!"

Chuck frowned in confusion, and glanced at the bottom right corner of his laptop screen. "Oh, crap," he muttered, slammed the lid down and shoved his laptop into his messenger bag. "Sorry! Sorry, I overslept!" he said, raising his voice to carry through the heavy door. "I'll be right there."

"No hurry," the voice said. "Your company's paying us by the hour."

"Crap, crap!" Chuck said, stumbling over the desk chair and nearly landing on his laptop-bag. He managed to catch himself with an arm on the bed, bouncing off and forward, staggering to the door. Chuck whipped the door open.

"Hi," he said, and then his brain ground to a halt. A detail had escaped him in his rush to get to the door. The voice he'd heard had been a little muffled by the thickness of the door, but he should have been able to recognize it as a woman's voice. Somehow the possibility had never occurred to him. The possibility that the person pounding on his door demanding entry would be maybe a couple inches shy of six feet, blond, well muscled, tan, and quite possibly the prettiest woman he'd ever laid eyes on, had somehow never entered his brain. "Uh," was all that came out, when Chuck's brain lurched back into gear.

"Hey," she said. "I'm Sarah Walker, Walker Marine Salvage? You, uh... want to put some pants on? Maybe a shirt to go along with? I mean, not that you're not easy on the eyes, but... you go out on the water like that, you'll die of sunstroke."

Chuck scrunched his eyes closed, hoping to open them and realize this whole misadventure had been nothing but a bad dream, well except for the hot girl part. He'd had enough 'realized he was naked at school' dreams, that he couldn't discount the possibility, but then he opened his eyes and he was still standing there in his boxer-briefs, and she was staring at him, one eyebrow arched expectantly. He slammed the door in her face and dove for his pants.

Outside in the hall, Sarah laughed softly. "Well, that could have gone better," she said.

Chuck dressed hurriedly and opened the door again. Sarah was standing impatiently in the doorway, with her arms crossed. "Hi. Didn't mean to slam the door in your face," he said. "I'm Chuck. Sorry, I panicked."

Sarah frowned and furrowed her brow at that one. "You panicked because I saw you without your shirt on? This bodes poorly for you. When was the last time you went to the beach?" She jerked her head in the direction he remembered the elevators being the night before, and started walking. He had to lengthen his stride considerably to catch up, and she was already at the elevator with the call button lit up when he arrived.

"So? Beach?" she reminded him.

"I guess, wow... five or six years? I've been working a lot lately."

Sarah turned to stare incredulously at him while they waited for the elevator. "I thought Roark Industries was in LA?"

"Instruments," Chuck said. "And it is."

"And you haven't been to the beach in five years?"

The elevator dinged, and Chuck shrugged, sliding into the giant metal box. Saved by the bell. But she persisted. "Seriously? Why not?"

"That's a little personal, isn't it?" Chuck said.

Sarah arched an eyebrow. "Not really."

"Okay, let me say this a different way," he said. "That's a little personal."

She winced. "Oh, sorry." They rode down in silence the rest of the way. Sarah leaned her back against the far wall and watched him the whole ride down.

She lead the way to a beat up Jeep Wrangler, which seemed to be missing some important equipment, like both doors. There was a mess of netting, the purpose of which Chuck couldn't guess, some kind of fishing equipment (not fishing poles, but with enough fishhooks that he figured it out from context clues), an oxygen tank and some flippers, along with a heavy duty toolbox built-in back behind the seats. At second glance, he noticed that there was no back seat; it must have been removed at some point to make more room for whatever all that was for in the back. The only things that seemed like they were actually secured were the oxygen tank and the toolbox.

Sarah cocked her head, catching his eye through the passenger seat. "You getting in or what?"

Chuck nodded slowly, and slipped in beside her, hoping she wouldn't detect his sudden reluctance, but she spoke up almost as soon as she had shifted into reverse.

"May not look like much but she's got it where it counts, kid. I've made a lot of special modifications myself," Sarah said, head craned around as she drove backwards out of the hotel's parking garage and onto the street. The heat was somewhat oppressive, and he probably should have been taking in the sights of the city, but he was too busy staring at the woman sitting next to him.

"What? Do I have something in my teeth?" she said, while they waited for the light to change.

"That... what you just said. That's from Star Wars."

Sarah turned and looked at him, eyebrow quirked. "Yeah..." she said. "So?"

"Okay," he said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but will you marry me?"

She didn't miss a beat. "Nope," Sarah said with a grin, and hit the gas, plastering Chuck to the seat from the acceleration.

"I apologize!" he said fervently.

Sarah glanced at him quizzically, taking her eyes from the road, which didn't do anything nice for Chuck's blood pressure. "What're you sorry for?" she said with a frown, slamming on the brakes at a second stop light. "Wait, you weren't serious about the marriage proposal, were you? That happens all the time."

"No," Chuck said. "Of course not. What really?"

Sarah somehow managed to roll her eyes and not plow them into the back of an eighteen wheeler when she was distracted. The jeep accelerated around another slow moving vehicle, going briefly into the oncoming lane to do it. "No, not really," she said as she flicked the wheel back and swerved into the correct lane once more.

"Okay, then I'm sorry for whatever you want me to be sorry for?"

"Why do you keep apologizing? I'm not mad at- oh, do you think I'm mad about you answering the door in your boxers?"

Chuck tried not to choke on his tongue. "I thought we were just awkwardly going to avoid talking about it all week."

"Wow. I guess that must have been pretty embarrassing for you. Hey, look on the bright side. It could have been worse."

"Yeah," Chuck agreed, then blinked. "How exactly?"

"Well from my point of view," she explained, "I mean, I don't know you from Adam, you could have opened the door and been horribly obese, wearing an adult diaper and demanding that I change you, for all I knew." She sent the Jeep rocketing forward into traffic again.

"Ah..." Chuck said, checking to make sure his seatbelt was securely fastened. "Yes, I guess... that would have been worse. Hang on, that's alarmingly specific. I hope that hasn't _happened _to you."

"No, no, nothing like that," she laughed, "thankfully. I just have a very active imagination. It's a gift... and a curse."

"I can see that," Chuck said and then seized hold of the roll-bar which served as the Jeeps 'roof,' "Hatchamama!"

She laughed at his reaction to her death-turn, squealing around a corner and nearly going up on two wheels. "Anybody ever tell you you're cute when you're in fear for your life?"

"No!" he said, once the Jeep was 'safely' back on two wheels. They were still going far too fast and Sarah was zipping around traffic, laying on the horn when necessary, but never slowing down. "Absolutely not. Until today, I've never actually been in _fear_ for my life, so it hasn't come up." He winced as they swerved around a slow moving truck holding what looked like a large number of chickens. He couldn't quite tell, it could have been feather pillows for all he knew, they moved by so quickly he had no time to focus on the vehicles they were passing. "Oh, god! Who taught you to drive?"

She shrugged. "My dad, who taught _you_ to drive?"

"And you actually have a driver's license?"

"License? We don't need no stinkin' license," Sarah said, teeth gleaming in a crooked grin. "And relax, we're almost there."

She took a hand off the wheel to point out the marina from which Walker Marine Salvage was based, and Chuck cringed. "Hands at ten and two, please?" he said.

Sarah laughed again. He realized that she had a very nice laugh, but wasn't too thrilled with it being directed at him so much of the time.

The tires squealed slightly as they pulled into a parking spot. "See?" she said, "Safe and sound."

"I hope you don't drive the _boat_ like that," Chuck said.

"Nah," Sarah said, "Dad's more of an old woman about that kind of thing than you are."

"Really?" Chuck said. "I'm an old woman because I think driving under a hundred miles an hour is maybe prudent?"

Sarah rolled her eyes, leading the way down the dock. "Please," she scoffed. "We barely got up to sixty-five. And Manila is like Miami, if you don't drive like a maniac you'll get flattened by somebody who _is _driving like a maniac."

"Oh so you admit you were driving like a maniac," Chuck shot back.

Sarah glared at him out the corner of her eye. "I can see talking to you is going to be some kind of pedantic argument all the time, isn't it."

"Semantic," Chuck corrected. "Pedantic is when you do it just to tick somebody off."

Sarah smirked. "I rest my case, Counselor. Here we are," she said, waving expansively. "Lisa's Revenge."

He resisted the urge to quote Star Wars back at her 'What a piece of junk,' while potentially a fitting description of the _Lisa's Revenge_, was not likely to help him win any friends, and though it might influence people, it probably wouldn't be in a direction he enjoyed. "It's certainly..." Chuck faltered trying to come up with a word that wasn't too insulting.

Sarah laughed instead of taking offense. "It's a piece of junk, you should have said," she grinned. "If you were going to try and base a relationship off Star Wars quotes, you should have quoted back at me. And it _is_ a piece of junk. We named it after my mom, kind of a wistful type deal, you know, when the was what we thought was new? But then everything started breaking left and right, and we realized she was a temperamental bitch just like mom."

Chuck winced a little to hear Sarah talking about her mother like that. He wasn't exactly close to his own mother, but that didn't mean he wanted other people to be estranged from their parents. "So, you're not close, you and your mother," he finally said.

Sarah shrugged. "That's a little personal isn't it?"

Chuck winced to have his own words thrown back in his face. "Sorry. I know how that goes," he said, without thinking. "My mom ran out on us when I was nine."

Sarah blinked, and her expression shifted. She shrugged a second time. "Don't worry about it. And yeah, I guess you could say my relationships with my mom is... a little complicated."

"Should we... ask permission to come aboard first or?"

Sarah shook her head in hopefully feigned exasperation, grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him up a boarding ramp made out of a thin sheet of plywood.

The _Lisa's Revenge_ was about forty-five or fifty feet long, with a raised housey-looking bit toward the front. There was what looked like a crane toward the back. Aft, wasn't that the aft of the boat? Chuck didn't know much about boats other than that there usually was a wheel that steered them, somewhere.

Sarah went right back past him back onto the dock, and Chuck turned to follow. She put a hand up to stop him. "No, stay on the ship, dummy. I'm just untying the mooring lines."

She ran up to the front of the boat. He didn't know what they called the front of the boat, if there was a phrase like aft, for fronts of boats.

He dug out his phone and hit up google while Sarah undid the mooring lines. Chuck was reading away when she returned. "Huh," she said. "You have a satellite phone or something? I get lousy reception out here at the marina."

"Huh?" Chuck said, looking up in time to see Sarah's eyes roll, and then narrow.

"What kind of phone is that?"

"Oh, I made it myself," Chuck explained on for a while, with Sarah's eyes glazing over a little more with every passing second. "I got tired of my friends spilling grape soda on my phones and ruining them, so I made one that's water-proof. Shock-proof, dust-proof, bulletproof—had a lot of fun testing that part out—"

Sarah blinked and looked at the phone more intently. "Bulletproof?"

"Well, not _completely_, but it'll stop most pistol rounds and keep on ticking," he said with a fair amount of pride.

"Oh, I guess that explains why it's so bulky," she said.

"Bulky?" Chuck said, mildly affronted. "I basically built my own iPhone, and you call it bulky?"

"Yes," she said. "It's like twice as big as my cell phone, and mine was like forty bucks. How much did your's cost?"

Chuck mumbled something indistinct, and Sarah grinned, pressing him on it. "Hmm?"

"Nine hundred seventy five dollars..." Chuck said a little more clearly.

Sarah's eyebrows went up, and she walked over to the wheelhouse (what would he do without google?), and banged on the aluminum siding with her fist. "Get a move on dad," she shouted. "We're burning this poor guy's money, and he already spent a thousand bucks on a phone."

Chuck crossed his arms and glared half-heartedly, "It's the company's money," he started to protest, but she just grinned disarmingly and went aft to check something by the stern. He checked his phone again for his list of nautical terms and yes, stern was the right name.

The boat lurched out of its spot by the deck... pier? Chuck checked his phone, but that wasn't on his current list. He'd have to do another search to— "Hey!" he said in outrage. "Give me back my phone!"

"Hang on, I want to see if it's really water-proof!" Sarah said, tossing it overboard.

"Great," Chuck said. "Do you have a net or something so we can fish it out, or...?"

Sarah arched and eyebrow and handed him _her _phone before leaning back on the rail and kicking her feet over, disappearing with a splash.

"Oh my god!" Chuck said. "Man- I mean woman overboard!" he shouted.

"What are you yammering about?" someone shouted from the wheelhouse, and Chuck saw a middle aged man sticking his head out an open window. That must be Sarah's father, Chuck mused.

"Your daughter just jumped overboard," Chuck explained.

Sarah's dad merely shrugged. "You should choose a better deodorant, then, ya schnook, and she'd have stayed on deck."

Chuck gaped at the man. Wasn't he worried? Chuck could have sworn it was super dangerous to jump off a boat when still in the harbor; the person running the boat wouldn't be able to see, and you could get crushed against the dock or something. "Oh leave him be, dad," Sarah's voice came from behind him, and Chuck jumped, startled, spinning around to face her. He blinked once and then averted his eyes entirely. She was wearing the same white t-shirt and khaki shorts, she'd been wearing a few moments ago and now, quite obviously due to her dunking, _wasn't _wearing a bra. "So apparently, you weren't kidding about this thing being water-proof. What would it cost to rig mine to be water-proof? Chuck? Why are you looking at the sky?"

"You're wearing a white t-shirt and no bra, Darlin," her father bellowed from the wheelhouse, "The schnook who paid a grand for a phone is _trying _to be a gentleman."

Sarah mad a small noise of embarrassment, and Chuck heard the wet slap of her feet retreating, hopefully for a change of clothes."I am not a schnook!" Chuck protested.

"That's what Nixon said," Sarah's father said.

Chuck turned, thankful for the distraction and walked over. "I don't think that's right," Chuck said, extending his hand. "Chuck Bartowski. And it's 'crook', not schnook."

He shook Chuck's hand absently, doing something with the boat controls as they got out into deeper water. "Jack Walker," he said. "And I've heard it both ways. Welcome to Walker Marine Salvage's flagship, _Lisa's Revenge._"

"C'mon dad," Sarah said, raising her voice from aft of them both. "Flagship? We've only got the one boat!"

"The Zodiac counts as a boat too, darlin," Jack shouted over the rumble of the boat's deisel engines. "And eyes front until she changes into something not sopping wet, Bartowski. You're paying us to recover something off the ocean floor, not to ogle my daughter."

"I wasn't... ogling," Chuck protested.

Jack grinned. "I've heard that before," he said, and shook his head ruefully, before waving Chuck into the wheelhouse. It was really just a single bow-facing box with windows on all sides, with a kind of counter holding a bunch of dials and readouts and an honest to god spoked captain's wheel, two feet wide or more, and obviously not original to the _Lisa's Revenge_, as there was a shiny strip of metal siding to the port side, where the wheel had rubbed the aluminum smooth, removing the white paint, which wouldn't have happened if the wheel had proper clearance.

Behind where Jack stood to steer the boat, was a table built into the aft wall of windows covered in charts and nautical books that— "Eyes front, schnook," Jack said without taking his eyes off where he was steering, and Chuck dutifully turned back forward.

"I wasn't looking at her," Chuck said. "I was just looking at the charts."  
>"I've heard that before, too," Jack said.<p>

"She was already downstairs anyway," Chuck said.

"Ha!" Jack said, and shrugged. "You're probably telling the truth, but charts can wait. We've got some safety stuff to go over." He kicked out backwards, hitting a box under the built-in chart-table. Life jackets in there; if we start to sink, grab one of those before you ditch. Assuming you can swim? Don't answer that, you'll just depress me if you can't. Other than that, try not to fall off in the middle of a monsoon."

"Do you expect any monsoons while we're out today?" Chuck said, digging his phone back out to check the weather reports.

"No, this is just, sort of a general thing," Jack said. "You know, it's probably a good idea. Like, don't let pirates shoot you and take over the boat, don't go swimming with open sores in shark-infested water. Don't go trifling with my little girl. Follow these simple guidelines, and I can all but guarantee you get back to port safe and sound. Doing any of those things would be equally detrimental to your health. We understand each other?"

"I believe so," Chuck said.

"Good. Now let's go find this downed plane of yours."

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

><p>AN: So, next chapter, you can expect the plot to thicken. Also, i follow through on the bikinis and scuba diving promise from the story summary. Still not going to venture a guess as to when that next chapter will be up. This story has been almost writing itself in a lot of ways.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Have been playing Zork as 'research' for this chapter.

Chapter 3:

"You do have the coordinates, right, Chuck?" Jack Walker said.

Chuck fumbled in his messenger bag until he found the Roark Instruments incident report on the crash, flipped to the appropriate page and read off the last known coordinates for the lost Gulfstream. Jack tapped the coordinates into the GPS as Chuck read, and then grimaced.

"Well, that's a pretty good run just to get there," he said, glancing at his watch. "We better boogie if we're going to get whatever it is off the wreck and back to the marina before dark. Probably three hours just to get there even with the superchargers."

Chuck's eyebrows rose. "Superchargers?"

Jack grinned. "They only add a couple knots to our top speed, but sometimes three knots is the difference between life and death." He pushed the throttle all the way forward and spun the wheel hard over.

Chuck swayed with the acceleration and frowned. "What? You find yourself in life and death situations often?"

"Well," Jack said, drawing the word out. "More than you might expect. South China Sea hasn't exactly been pirate free the last two hundred years."

"Hey, quit filling our client's head with your crazy pirate-phobia, dad," Sarah said, poking her head in the wheelhouse door. Chuck turned, hoping to be reassured about a lack of pirates, but instead, he blinked at her apparent lack of shirts.

"Uh..." Chuck stammered. "Why aren't you wearing a shirt?"

Sarah arched an eyebrow and stepped into the doorway, revealing that she was wearing a bikini patterned after the American flag. Chuck had never felt more patriotic in his life. "Because it's hot out," she said. "And I'm still wet from jumping in the ocean?"

"I can see that," Chuck said, and then had to fight off a coughing fit, when he realized he'd said that out loud. Jack barked a laugh, and Chuck remembered that the older man was Sarah's father. He squeezed his eyes shut and turned to face the bow, which was probably the only gentlemanly direction to turn his eyes at the moment.

"Darlin," Jack said. "You're gonna melt the schnook's brain in a minute, at least go put on somethin' over that thing."

Sarah rolled her eyes. Chuck caught that out of the corner of his eye. Trying to be a gentleman or not, he was still human, male and had a functioning circulatory system. "But it's fun watching him squirm," she complained. "I'm out of my depth here, dad. Usually our clients have trouble meeting my eyes for an entirely different reason. Twenty bucks and I'll cover up, Charlie."

"Sarah," Jack admonished. "We're already getting' paid."

"Hey, at least I'd be getting paid to put my clothes _on,_ and not to take them off," Sarah smirked. "And I need to go belowdeck to get the ROV anyway, it was just a thought."

"The what?" Chuck said, ears perking up. "You've got one of those little robot subs? That's so awesome! I've always wanted to see how one of those actually worked."

"Come on then," she said. "Follow me."

"Um... how about I go first," Chuck said. Temptation being what it was, he was absolutely certain he couldn't stop himself from staring if he had to walk behind her.

Sarah smirked and waved for him to precede her. "The ladder's just around the corner a few feet aft, there you go."

"So, how about the five cent tour?" Chuck said as he went down the ladder.

"Sure thing, Chuck," Sarah said from above him. Chuck looked up involuntarily and then stared at his feet hoping the blush would subside before they finished climbing down into the ship's lower deck. "Down the hall aft is the engine room, which you could probably already tell from the noise!" she had to raise her voice to be heard over the rumble of _Lisa's Revenge_'s two huge diesel engines. A few seconds earlier it hadn't been anything to worry about, but Jack had the ship moving at nearly full power. "There's the tool closet," she pointed, "Then moving toward the bow, we've got my cabin, Dad's cabin, and the galley. Feel free to snoop around the common areas, I'll just be a sec," Sarah darted into her cabin and shut the door.

Chuck felt unaccountably better with the door between them. She was a little overwhelming to be around, and not just because of her beauty. He hadn't really ever met anyone like Sarah before, much less been forced into such close proximity. Also, the bikini was all kinds of distracting when his willpower failed him (more often than his self-image as a nice guy would have liked) and he sneaked a look.

He stuck his head into the galley and was a little shocked. He'd always had an image in his mind of a ship's galley—from pirate movies, mostly—as a raucous and messy place, but the galley of _Lisa's Revenge_ combined all the best parts of living-room, dining-room and kitchen. Even empty and scrubbed clean save for a rack with pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, it was... cozy... there was no other word for it.

Chuck walked past a gas stove and microwave built into the wall—bulkhead—he corrected, and spotted a cluster of framed photographs along the wall. He glanced at the pictures and slowly began to grin. There were a couple of a little blond girl and a noticeably younger Jack Walker, but then a gap. There weren't any photos of her growing up, just those two when she must have been seven or eight, and then late teens, with her and Jack on the deck of _Lisa's Revenge_, back when the paint wasn't peeling as bad. There were no awkward growing up pictures. Well, except for the one with her in braces and orthodontic headgear of some kind. His lip twitched into a wider grin.

"Oh, my god," Sarah's voice said behind him. "I guess you took me literal on the snooping thing," she sighed. "I should have burned the negatives."

"What? Why?" Chuck said as he turned to face her. Thankfully she had covered up some, but she was wearing a blue spandex shirt of some kind with a stylized surfboard emblazoned across her chest, and a gauzy wrap-style skirt. "You were a cute kid."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "You know I mean the headgear picture; I keep taking it down and throwing it in the ocean, but Dad's got the negatives hidden away somewhere, and I haven't found them... yet."

Chuck grinned. "Well, this is the twenty-first century. Maybe he's got a digital copy somewhere. I know if I wanted to make sure I didn't lose a picture, I'd use an online filesharing site."

"Oh, god," Sarah's eyes widened. "You're telling me that picture might be on the _internet!_" She shook her head in denial. "No, wait. This is my dad, we're talking about; he's not tech savvy enough for something like that."

"Okay, Chuck shrugged. "But it's actually pretty simple. Still maybe he's not as sneaky as me."

Sarah somehow started to choke on thin air, suffering a brief coughing fit before she got it under control. "Can we change the subject?" Sarah asked miserably.

"Sure," Chuck said. "I'm actually pretty excited to see this robosub."

"It's called an ROV," Sarah said. "Get it right, captain semantics."

"Potato potahto," he said with a shrug and a dismissive wave of his hand.

"You are thoroughly exasperating," she said. "Do you know that?"

"And yet only twenty minutes ago when you were trying out for the Indy 500, I was cute."

"Yeah, well, you know how they say absence makes the heart grow fonder?" she said. "The opposite is also true."

Chuck clutched at his chest as if struck in the heart by an arrow. "You wound me, Sarah Walker."

"Moving on," she said, "you want to help me with this?"

"What?"

"The table," Sarah nodded. "Two man job putting the table up."

Chuck shuffled over and followed her lead. The table was full sized, but hinged along one side, he saw now, as Sarah tilted the table up with Chuck's help, and it folded up against the bulkhead. A small wooden lever Chuck hadn't noticed nailed into the wood above head-height folded out and held the table up out of the way. Under where the table had sat was a small trap door.

Sarah squatted down and flipped the hatch open, reaching in and handing him a huge spool of thick electrical cable.

"What's this?" Chuck asked, trying to find the end of the cable so he could see what kind of connector it used. It was thicker than any computer cable he'd ever seen, probably half-inch at least, and the closest he could come was the T4 line that came through Roark Instruments.

"Power and telemetry and video line for the 'robosub' as you call it," Sarah shrugged. "Put that down and come help me get this thing up. It's not heavy, it's just awkward by myself."

The ROV was sitting in a small cubby under the floor, somewhere between two and three feet long and a foot and a half wide, with a blue plastic case and a plexiglass dome of some kind at what Chuck assumed was the front. There was a matte finish metal railing around the top side, that Chuck grabbed, and shifted around so he wouldn't fall on top of Sarah if he lost his balance.

"Careful," Sarah said. "That thing costs as much as tuition to Harvard."

"You went to Harvard?"

"No," Sarah blushed and shrugged. "I mean, it would have; didn't work out. I don't want to talk about it."

"Yeah, sorry," Chuck said. "I didn't mean to pry. You got the other end?"

"Hang on one sec, and—" Sarah scooped up the spool of heavy cable and looped it over her arm before grabbing the rear section of the railing on the ROV and hauling. "There we go. You want to go backward or forward?"

"Lady's choice," Chuck said. Sarah arched an eyebrow and waddling backward down the corridor to the ladder topside. She had been right, of course, the ROV was maybe fifty pounds, and between the two of them, it wasn't really heavy, just awkward. Mostly because of the expense of the thing, Chuck was being extra careful.

Sarah and Chuck lugged the ROV up on deck and she nodded toward the stern, where she set her end of the submersible down behind the crane. "You mind if I ask? Why a crane?"

"I mind if you ask."

"Sorry," Chuck said with a wince.

Sarah's eyes widened. "Kidding, god you're easy! We're running a salvage company here. Sometimes that means actually pulling wrecks up off the ocean floor. Mostly that's with floatation balloons, but the crane helps out more than you'd think. And it paid for itself when we found a chest of Spanish doubloons."

"Seriously?"

"Where do you think we got the money for the ROV?"

Chuck shrugged. "I hadn't thought about it."

Sarah grunted. "Whatever, anyway, let's get the monitors set up," she said, kicking open a storage locker filled with wires and cables and a pair of small television sets.

First they had to haul a folding card table out from behind the lockers, but Chuck got a crash course in ROV operations, or at least the setup for them. While they were hooking the cables up, she explained how the new models they couldn't afford were wireless, and could run faster off batteries than theirs did plugged into the ship's diesel-electric generator. Sarah had done her research, and they got lost in the technical details; Chuck was aghast when she revealed their method of Chuck thought he could hook his laptop into the feed and make a digital recording. Sarah wasn't convinced until he explained how much money they'd been spending on VHS tape and how little an upgrade would cost them. Chuck glanced up eventually and spotted Jack standing behind him.

"Who's driving the boat?" Chuck demanded.

"Conning," Sarah corrected instantly. "You drive cars. You con a boat."

"The point remains," he said. "Who's _conning_ the boat?"

"I didn't see any other boats at all, Chuck," Jack said, with just the oddest hint of a grin. "Should be fine for a few minutes. Besides, we have such a thing as an auto-pilot on this tub. Just wanted to come check on you two. I thought you wanted a look at the charts."

"Well, Sarah was explaining the ROV, and I'm kind of a techno-nerd at heart," he said. "I got... engrossed."

"I'll bet," Jack laughed, eyes darting between the pair. Sarah rolled her eyes.

"How much longer to the coordinates Chuck gave you?"

"About an hour," he said. "You all set up back here, though?"

"Yeah, dad," Sarah said. "What's up?"

"You forgot to bring back the scuba tank from your lesson."

Sarah smacked herself in the forehead. "Oh, crap. Sorry," she said. "But we won't need it today, will we? We've got a couple spares, yeah?"

"Yes, we do," Jack said. "But I don't remember if there's any air in them?"

"Oh, I guess I'd better go check," Sarah started forward to the ladder belowdecks.

"If you've got your own scuba tanks, why does Sarah need lessons?" Chuck wondered aloud.

Jack barked a laugh. "No, schnook," he said. "She _teaches_ scuba."

"Oh, cool! I've always wanted to learn to dive," Chuck said.

"Well, we've probably got time," Jack shrugged. "I'll leave you to your techno-nerding activities. I've got a boat to drive."

"I thought it was called conning."

Jack shrugged again. "A word of advice about my daughter? Never let her get the last word, she'll respect you more. She can call it whatever she wants, I just drive the boat." He clapped Chuck on the shoulder and made his way back to the wheelhouse.

Chuck glanced over the connections between his laptop and the monitors and controls for the ROV, and grinned. He still had a game of _Zork _to figure out.

He found the file he'd downloaded and double tapped with the touchpad.

The familiar black and white text box came up, and Chuck blanched in horror.

**West of House**

**You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.**

**There is a small mailbox here.**

"Oh, crap," Chuck said. "It started me at the beginning?" He winced and wracked his brain. How the hell did he get back to the troll? "Double crap." He couldn't remember. He knew it was fairly close to be starting point, but he was drawing a blank. Still, he didn't really need an excuse to play computer games.

He was in the basement, about to be eaten by a grue, when Sarah turned back up. It had taken him almost twenty minutes to get that far since it seemed like all of his Zork mojo had left him. He pushed himself back to his feet and shrugged his shoulders. Chuck's back was stiff from bending over to type and squint into the display.

Sarah spotted the black-and-white text and frowned. "What's that?"

"That... is _Zork," _Chuck explained. "It's this old text based computer game from the eighties."

"Oh, whatever," she said. "Dad said you were thinking about scuba lessons?"

"Not a fan of video games?" Chuck said. "You like Star Wars, but not video games? Does not compute."

Sarah shook her head. "We used to have a nintendo when I was little," she said. "But it was never really my thing."

"Well," Chuck said. "I guess nobody's perfect."

"And it's not that I really like Star Wars that much," she explained. "For a while there, it was just one of the only movies we owned. That and _Raiders of the Lost Ark_. Our VHS library is still pretty limited."

"Hang on," Chuck said. "Wait just a minute. I thought the VCR was just for the ROV... not... you really don't have a DVD player? What about Netflix? Nevermind," he went on at the blank look on her face, turning back to the laptop screen. "I'm just about back to where I was, when I got this email."

"Email? What?"

Chuck shrugged. "My old roommate at Stanford, we both played this game. We actually used to write our own; I know, shocking. I'm a big nerd. He emailed me this file, and it started up in the Troll Room. If I'm doing this right, I think. Yes..."

**go north**

**The Troll Room**

**This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls.**

**A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room. Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.**

"This is where it started me the first time, good thing I picked up the sword this time,"

**kill troll**

Instead of the usual message, about knocking the troll unconscious, the screen flashed, and a series of numbers scrolled up. Chuck frowned. "It's not supposed to do that," he complained. "This doesn't make any sense. We haven't spoken since senior year, and he sends me Zork, but it's rigged to do what? Show me a bunch of random numbers? I thought this was some weird half-assed apology."

"What'd he do?" Sarah said.

"Tried to frame me for cheating," Chuck said. "My webcam caught him planting the tests under my bed, and I got rid of them before he could tip off the dean."  
>"Ouch," Sarah said. "And this guy was a friend of yours?"<p>

"I thought so at the time," Chuck shrugged. "But I guess not."

"So you turned him in, then?" Sarah said. "For trying to frame you?"

"No," Chuck said. "It just never occurred to me to turn him in. I had already destroyed the evidence that _he _had stolen the tests. I didn't do it to protect him, but that's how it worked out. And then I was still trying to figure out why he'd done it, when my girlfriend said she was breaking up with me to be with Bryce."

"I hope you did something to get back at him," Sarah said.

"Well, yeah," Chuck said. "I broke his nose for him the next time I saw him. It was weird, he was trying to get me to come work with him in the State department like nothing had happened, but I was too pissed to pay attention; I just let him have it and walked off."

"Wow," Sarah said. "How long ago was all this? Seems like the wound's still kind of fresh."

"Six years," Chuck said, and Sarah got quiet. "What?"

"Just doing the math," she said. "Girlfriend broke up with you on the beach, didn't she?"

Chuck grimaced. "Right _after_ I got down on one knee to propose. Not before, couldn't do that, could she. Sorry," he said. "I'm not supposed to go on and on about the Jill/Bryce betrayal exacta. Drives away the ladies, my sister tells me."

Sarah shrugged and waved expansively at the open ocean around them. There wasn't any land in sight. "Where would I go?" she said. Sarah leaned in to look at the numbers, still flashing merrily on the screen. "Huh."

"What's up?"

"Your old nemesis know where you are?"

Chuck shrugged. "I can't see how. Why?"

She tapped the screen gently. "Those are GPS coordinates. It's only a few miles north of where that plane went down."

Chuck shrugged. "Must just be one of those weird coincidences. Bryce is probably just messing with me. Probably gets a kick out of it. Send Chuck bizarre GPS coordinates, make him go on wild goose chase to the Philippines. Sounds like something he'd do."

"Has he done something like that before?"

"Well he tried to frame me for cheating," Chuck said.

Sarah shook her head. "Yeah, but that was simple, and the motive seems uncomplicated. He was trying to steal your girlfriend, and wanted you out of the way. This, I can't see a reason for. Why _these_ coordinates? And when did he send this email to you?"

Chuck frowned. "I don't know, some time while I was on the plane maybe?"

"So I guess he might have known you were coming here when he sent them?" Sarah said.

"Sure, I guess he could have. My trip wasn't exactly top secret," Chuck said.

"We could go check out Bryce's coordinates, if you want?"

"Ah, why bother?" Chuck said. "It's probably nothing, and we need to find that plane first."

"You say so," Sarah shrugged, but she still jotted the coordinates down on a post-it note and stuffed it into Chuck's breast pocket before letting him close the game window. "In case you change your mind," she explained.

"Your dad said you could teach me to scuba dive? How does that work on a moving boat?"

Sarah shook her head. "You don't get in the water until the second hour at least. First lesson is all technical stuff. Should be right up your alley."

Chuck managed a grin, but he couldn't quite get the thought of that second set of coordinates out of his head. Why _had _Bryce sent them to him? And why the weirdness with the Zork hack to deliver them? He shook his head and tried to concentrate as Sarah began explaining about oxygen narcosis and nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream, and half a dozen other ominous sounding things. He had enough to worry about, he decided, without thinking about why Bryce Larkin did the things he did.

* * *

><p>TO BE CONTINUED...<p>

A/N: Next time, the downed Roark Instruments jet yields up its secrets, and leaves our heroes with more questions than answers.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4:

Chuck's impromptu scuba lesson was cut short barely half an hour later, when Jack shouted from the wheelhouse to announce their arrival at the coordinates Chuck had given him earlier.

"We made better time than I thought," Jack said, once Chuck and Sarah joined him at the wheelhouse. "You mind helping my darling daughter get the ROV in the water? Then we can get cracking."

Chuck shrugged. "No problem," he said and turned back toward the stern, where they'd set up the ROV by the aft railing. Sarah shook her head and grinned at him as he stooped to check the connections. Chuck frowned up at her. "What's wrong?"

She gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Nothing," she said. "Usually, when we take people out, they just end up fishing the whole time or staring at my butt until Dad throws them overboard."

Chuck's eyes widened. "Did he really..."

Sarah punched him in the arm. "C'mon," she said. "Of course not, and besides, you're mostly safe anyway."

"W-what? Why mostly?"

"You've been very circumspect. No staring at all, just the occasional sidelong glance when you think I'm not paying attention. I don't think Dad's even noticed. Close your mouth before you catch flies, and help me get this thing in the water."

Chuck struggled not to get flustered and bent to lift the submersible. Then he arched an eyebrow. Sarah seemed to be... watching him with a vague hint of... The struggle not to become flustered was suddenly a losing battle. "Are you..."

"What?" Sarah grinned with a raised eyebrow. "If it's good for the gander..." She rolled her eyes and lowered her voice. "That's at least a B+ on the glutes, Chuck. You work out?"  
>"I..." Chuck started, but then stopped, unable to come up with anything to say to that before Sarah grabbed up the other side of the ROV and helped Chuck swing the awkwardly bulky vehicle over the railing. They lowered it carefully into the water, and Sarah took the trailing cable and played it out over to the card-table where they had set up the monitors earlier.<p>

Chuck stood at the rail for a few seconds, until Jack came aft and slapped him on the back. "You alright there, Chuck?"

"Yeah..." he finally managed. "Just... rebooting."

"Looked a lot like staring slack-jawed into space."

"Yeah," Chuck said. "Well."

"I think I broke his brain," Sarah chortled while running the initialization protocols for the ROV.

Jack rolled his eyes. "I warned you to stop doing that to people."

Sarah gave that same one-armed shrug again. "But he's so easy," she grinned. "Chuck, you'll want to come watch this, the cameras are booting up. I promise no more breaking of brains. For a while at least."

Chuck grumbled under his breath and joined her at the monitors.

The image wasn't great, there was a fair amount of dust or something in the water. "Why's it all murky?" Chuck wondered. "It's not that far down yet, is it?"

"Nah," Sarah said and waved absently back toward land. "Water's kind of churned up from our wake, that's all. Should clear up once we get down past thirty feet or so, see look."

The picture cleared even as she spoke, and the ROV's cameras sent back a minimally grainy image of the bottom of the South China Sea. It was surprisingly clear, once the ROV was out of the turbulence of the boat's wake. Chuck let out a low whistle. "How far down is the bottom?"

"Not sure," Sarah said absently. "Dad? What's the depth here?"

"'Bout thirty fathoms."

"People still use 'fathoms'?" Chuck asked.

"We do around landlubbers," Jack said. "Also around schnooks."

Chuck sighed. "Aw, I thought we were past the whole schnook thing."

Sarah laughed. "You're a man, and roughly the same age as his darling daughter. You're never past the schnook thing. Dad are you sure we're at the right coordinates?"

"What do you mean," Chuck said. "GPS is seldom wrong."

"Yeah, kiddo," Jack said. "These are the coordinates schnook gave me. Why?"

"There's no plane," Sarah said.

"How can you tell?" Chuck protested.

"The ROV is down about half-way. I can see the bottom, and the skin of the plane should be reflecting back off the halogen lamps; it's too far down for sunlight I think. I'll make a loop around to be sure we're not just a few hundred yards off in either direction, but so far.. no plane."

"What about that?" Chuck pointed at a tiny glint showing up on the bottom nearby.

"That's not..." Sarah started. "Huh."

"What d'ya got kiddo?" Jack asked.

"Hang on," she fiddled with the controls and leaned in closer to the monitor. "It's too small to be the plane, but it's definitely metal. Another thirty seconds and we'll be able to tell for sure."

Chuck and Jack crowded around the monitor, and Jack shaded the small TV with his hand. "Well, congratulations darlin'. You found a door."

"Hang on," Chuck said. "That must be the door off the plane. But where's the rest of the wreck?"

Jack rubbed his chin. "Chuck, you still got the report your boss gave you?"

"Yeah, just a second," Chuck said, fumbling the thick sheaf of paper out. "Okay, what am I looking for."

"It say in there what the plane's airspeed was when it hit?"

Chuck frowned and leafed through the report. "Uh... I'm looking. Why?"

"If it was in a straight on-dive. It'd be on the bottom pretty close to its last known coordinates. Like if the plane was completely out of control. But if, say, the pilot put her down relatively gently..."

"Oh!" Sarah said. "Crap, you're right."

Chuck raised his hand. "Late to the party here? Somebody want to explain for the slow kid?"

"Water is pretty much the same as air, from a fluid dynamics perspective. They can use wind-tunnels to test boat hulls, and water tanks to test airplane hulls. It's why submarines have got those little wings on 'em," Jack went on. "Your plane may have flown through the water for a couple of miles before it hit bottom. That's if it stayed in one piece when it hit, of course. At a couple hundred knots it's like hitting concrete."

"Oh," Chuck said. "Why'd you say 'crap,' Sarah?"

"Because we've got to do _math _now," she explained.

Chuck grinned. "Well, it's a good thing you've got me, then. Isn't it?"

* * *

><p>However, reconstructing the plane's flight-path data and estimating it's glide-slope as it fell to the bottom of the ocean was more complicated than Chuck envisioned at first, and Sarah and Jack had retrieved the ROV before he had even figured out what kind of calculus it was even going to involve. It turned out to be ordinary differential equations, thankfully, and not the horribly tricky <em>partial <em>variety, but still, Chuck's diff-eq skills had atrophied some since Stanford. His job at Roark Instruments had largely been on the software end of things, and not the hardware side, so he didn't have as much day to day use for the more convoluted stuff he'd had drilled into his head.

"So..." Sarah said eventually, watching Chuck with his paper and pencil. "You need a calculator or something?"

Chuck sighed. "No, the arithmetic is fairly straightforward, once I build the equation right. If I get it wrong, I'll have us looking in the wrong place again," he shrugged. "And we won't know if I'm wrong until we get over there and take a look. This could be a longer search than we thought. But, I think I've got it."

Chuck did a little more scratch work and nodded, reading off a new set of coordinates. "Somebody want to double check me?"

Sarah got out a solar powered desktop calculator and they put their heads together.

Jack grunted and headed for the fridge. They had given over the fold-down table to Chuck's seemingly endless scratch-paper, so he waited until he caught Chuck's eye to toss him a beer.

Chuck glanced at the familiar-brand aluminum can, and back to Mr. Walker. "You earned it. He mess up the math?" Sarah shook her head, and Jack grinned, tore off the bottom part of the paper with the new location and headed topside.

"So how far does the math say the plane glided?"

"About twenty six hundred meters," Chuck said. "Sorry. One point six miles give or take a couple significant digits."  
>"How significant?" Sarah said.<p>

"No, I... never mind," he said. "Nerd speak. The GPS coordinates should be about right."

"Good," Sarah said. "I'd better go get my wetsuit then."

Chuck blinked in surprise and followed her out of the galley, leaving his beer unopened and heading aft toward the stairs. "I thought you'd just use the ROV again."

"Oh we will," Sarah said. She ducked into her cabin and came out with her wetsuit under her arm. "But the little grabber arm thing is busted, and I don't think it'd be up to pulling out a laptop. Much easier all around if somebody goes down there and pokes around the wreck."

"Right," Chuck said going up the ladder. "I hadn't thought that one all the way through yet." Sarah stopped and sat in the hatch opening, tugging her wetsuit up her legs, and then shrugging the sleeves up over her shoulders. It reminded Chuck of a snake shedding its skin, but in reverse. Also, there was a little bit of jiggling happening that he tried to ignore.

Sarah rolled her eyes. Apparently his attempt was a failure. She bobbed up to her feet and hauled the zipper up. Her wetsuit was two-toned black and blue, and she was fiddling with something else. Chuck frowned. "Why do you need a knife?" he asked while she strapped a bright orange scabbard to her calf.

"Standard gear, Chuck," Sarah explained. "In case I have to go hand-to-hand with an octopus or something."

"You're kidding... right?"

"Well," Sarah said. "About the octopus thing? Yeah. But you never know what you'll get tangled up with, and it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, am I right?"

"Be prepared. You'd have done the Boy Scouts proud, Sarah Walker."

She rolled her eyes. "Ugh, don't remind me. My dad made me join the Girl Scouts one summer. What a disaster."

"I don't know," Chuck said. "I can imagine you doing pretty well selling those cookies."

Sarah smiled, but there was a hint of sadness in it when she responded. "You have no idea."

Chuck frowned. "What? What is it?"

"Forget I said anything, okay? Long story, and we don't have time for it. Come on," she said. "Let's put the ROV back in the water."

* * *

><p>Jack came back from the wheelhouse a few minutes later, once he'd set both anchors. "So, Chuck," Jack said. He had the Roark Instruments report on the crash in his hand. "I figured we'd be doing a body recovery or two on this one. A little business jet like that crashes; I mean usually they don't have parachutes, but this thing says the pilot and copilot all got off before the plane went in. Seems unlikely."<p>

"How so?" Chuck said. "I read that thing cover to cover on the trip over. The plane had engine failure, he put on the auto-pilot and then they jumped when they were a couple dozen yards over the water."

Jack shrugged. "I don't know, schnook, I've read a lot of these reports. There's something hinky going on here."

"I got this straight from Mr. Roark. Well, his secretary, but still," Chuck said. "You're saying he rigged up a false report?"

Sarah let out a curse and shouted for them. "Hey, guys? You might want to come take a look at this!"

Chuck and Sarah's father trotted over and glanced at the monitor. Chuck blanched and Jack grimaced. Though the halogen lamps on the ROV threw up a glare off the single pane of the front windscreen that was left intact, Chuck could still see a figure in the cockpit, his hair waving slightly in the current. The pilot, dead in his chair, his four-point seatbelt still fastened.

"Oh my god," he said. "What the hell is going on?"

"Great," Sarah said. "That's reassuring. I was about to ask you the same thing."

"Looks like somebody's pulling a con on you, schnook," Jack said.

Chuck shook his head. "I don't get it," he complained. "Why would he falsify the report? It doesn't... none of this makes sense."

"Kiddo?" Jack said.

"Yeah," Sarah said. "I'm on it."

"What? On what?" Chuck said.  
>Sarah rose from a nearby storage chest and held up a camcorder set up for underwater filming. "We need to document everything. When a client is lying to us and it's his word against ours, videotape is our best friend. You wouldn't believe how many times we <em>haven't <em>gone to court because of this thing." She rapped her knuckles on the plexiglass casing.

Chuck was still having trouble wrapping his mind around the sudden turn of events. They had found the plane, but... he hadn't been prepared for the sight. From what the report said there shouldn't be any dead bodies, but the monitor didn't lie. He fought off the urge to curl up into a little ball, and then Jack hit him in the back.

Chuck coughed and straightened. "First dead body?"

"Yes!" he said. "God, isn't this freaking anybody else out? How are you just okay with there being a dead guy down there."

Sarah shrugged. "We salvaged a wrecked World War II PT boat a couple years ago; it went down with all hands back in like forty-something. Full of skeletons and a couple mummified corpses. Seeing it in the ROV monitor is a lot less stressful than having one fall out of a ruptured bulkhead onto your back in a hundred feet of water."

Chuck's stared at her, unable to reconcile her easygoing banter with someone who'd had a skeleton appear out of nowhere and land on her back. He'd have expected her to be scarred for life, but maybe that was the lesson. Fear didn't leave physical scars, and once the initial shock wore off, maybe the emotional ones weren't as bad as others. Like those left by betrayal, he thought darkly, and shook himself out of those morbid thoughts. "I can see how that would be... yeah, stressful you said?" he managed a halfhearted laugh. "I mean, wow, you've got to be a front-runner for the understatement of the year award."

"If you don't want to watch the monitors for this next part, Chuck, that's okay," Jack said. "Wrecks are always a little spooky, even without bodies in them."

Chuck shook his head. "I'll be fine," he said. "I'm not going to get scared and scream like a little girl if I see a dead body. I'm just... I wasn't expecting it, okay? That's more what's got me a little wound up; it's the shock of it all."

"Okay," Sarah said. "Then help me put on my air tanks, okay? It'll be good for you to see how it's done."

It didn't really seem like Sarah needed all that much help, and Chuck suspected the continuation of his scuba lesson was really just to get his mind of dead bodies down there in the darkness at the bottom of the sea. Sarah's scuba-camcorder had a cord just like the ROV's which she tossed to Jack before Chuck started hauling the heavy air tank up into position.

Sarah shrugged her shoulders and took the added weight easily, turning and sitting on the railing to put on her flippers. With a decided lack of ceremony, she dumped the camcorder over the side.

Chuck handed her a pair of goggles, and Sarah grinned. "Thanks," she said. "And Chuck?"  
>"Yeah," he said.<br>"Don't freak out," she said. "We'll figure this thing out, alright? Together." She barely let him finish nodding before she tipped herself backward over the rail and disappeared into the depths.

TO BE CONTINUED...


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: Ehhhhhhhh, I'm still not really happy with the way this chapter turned out, but here it is anyway. Don't yell at me if the diving stuff isn't _exactly _right, please. Wikipedia, while a useful resource, isn't exactly foolproof and I've probably taken some liberties that anyone with extensive diving experience will take umbrage with. Just roll with it.

* * *

><p>Chapter 5:<p>

Sarah didn't particularly like doing a tech-dive without a buddy, but her father wasn't supposed to dive again for another week or so thanks to the beating his inner ear had taken. It wasn't something she could share with their client, even if he seemed fairly trustworthy, since strictly speaking they weren't certified as an underwater demolition crew. The occasional off the books side-job scuttling old ships to use as wreck-diving spots for the scuba-tourists had been known to keep Walker Marine Salvage in business, but right now, going into an unknown wreck-site, she wished her dad had been a little less liberal in his use of C4 last time out. She'd have felt better with him down there with her, even if it let Chuck loose to snoop around the boat. It was a spurious thought anyway; she doubted Chuck was the type to go around rooting through her underwear drawer just because the coast was clear.

Sarah grimaced around the regulator in her mouth and turned her mind back to the task at hand. She kept one hand on the cable from the ROV and panned the camera with its attached spotlight around as she swam down into the dark waters. Thanks to a gentle upward slope in the bottom as they'd followed the plane's glidepath, the wreck wasn't a hundred-eighty feet down, as it would have been at the first coordinates, but closer to ninety. Going down that far without a buddy wouldn't just have been an inconvenience, it would have been downright dangerous. Granted, even diving ninety feet down with out a second diver wasn't exactly a cakewalk, but she'd done it a couple dozen times before in the decade she'd been diving. Her tank had a little more than an hour worth of air, which dictated her dive profile. But hopefully, she would find the missing laptop right away and she wouldn't have to be down for more than half of her supply.

When Sarah and her father had arrived in the Philippines a step ahead of both the mob and the FBI, Sarah had taken to scuba immediately with a passion and a tenacity that had surprised her, and completely confounded her father. Sarah's love of diving had been at least half the reason for the founding of Walker Marine Salvage in the first place; the other half being Jack's need to figure out someplace to put the quarter million dollars he'd 'borrowed' from the west-coast mob, that wouldn't show up on a bank statement. They'd bought _Lisa's Revenge _straight cash from a man who had turned out to be something approaching the Filipino equivalent of her father, which explained a good deal about the boat's initial condition.

Diving was freeing for Sarah, which considering all the constraints that went along with the activity was an oddity her father had never understood. She liked the combination of seeming weightlessness when weighted down to neutral buoyancy and the time to let her mind wander during safety and decompression stops at the end of a dive. For her father diving was always about work, and Jack hadn't ever really been a fan of actual work, but over the last few years he'd become about as stable and dependable as Sarah ever remembered him being. The combination of an open bounty from the Armenian mob and an arrest warrant in the great state of California had had the unforeseen side effect of turning Jack from an thoroughly incorrigible conman into a mostly incorrigible sea captain, and Sarah was at once thankful for and a touch saddened by the change. It was something in her own makeup that she tried not to examine too closely, that thirst for danger and excitement which was quite possibly genetic. The risk inherent in diving was a lure as well, she was self-aware enough to admit.

The spotlight built into the casing of her camcorder finally hit the ROV, and Sarah's time for introspection was finished. Now it was work. The ROV's floodlights illuminated the downed Gulfstream fairly well, and getting around inside the wrech shouldn't be too difficult, but they were right on the edge of their safety guidelines. Ninety feet of water plus maybe ten feet of penetration into the wreck meant that the interior would be pretty close to pitch dark. Sunlight still managed to get to the bottom here, barely, and when Sarah glanced up briefly, she could make out the shape of _Lisa's Revenge _above her, and the two lines to the anchors fore and aft that her father had placed.

The lines faded into obscurity toward the bottom thanks to the low visibility; the ROV floods and the spot built into her camcorder were her primary light source and didn't reach much beyond twenty yards. First things first, Sarah checked her air gauge, and nodded. Her tank had a little more compressed air remaining than she'd projected, which was good. That meant she'd have maybe a whole extra minute or two in the wreck. Her air would last for more than an hour, but a fair amount of that time would be spent on a slow ascent, with pre-programmed stops to make sure she didn't give herself decompression sickness, commonly known as 'the bends.'

Sarah swam around the wreck once, panning her camera over the tail number, so Chuck's bosses back in LA would know for sure they'd found the right plane. Then she panned the rest of the wreck, showing the position and orientation, in case they wanted to bring the thing back up, so Gulfstream could see what had gone wrong with the engines.

The jet was still mostly intact, she was surprised to see, with the fuselage bent and torn toward the nose where the metal skin had impacted the ocean-bottom and dug a furrow in the silt. One of the wings had torn half-way off and gave the crash an odd similarity to a bird with a broken wing that she suddenly remembered from her childhood.

She and her mother had tried and failed to nurse the thing back to health. Sarah shook the memory off and made her way to the front of the plane, shining her light into the cockpit so Chuck's bosses could see the dead man at the controls. She resisted the impulse to turn the camera on herself and shake her fist into the lens. It wasn't the first time they'd been lied to by a client, but it wasn't exactly commonplace either, and it... irritated wasn't a strong enough word, but infuriated was too strong. She was miffed, maybe. Or peeved. Something in the middle. She was more peeved, really, that Chuck's employers hadn't trusted him with the truth. That much had been obvious from his reaction; unless he was a far better actor than he seemed to be, Chuck had been just as shocked as Sarah and her father to find a dead body still at the controls of the downed aircraft. She, better than most, understood keeping secrets, but Chuck had been working for Roark Instruments for years. She could understand the higher-ups not trusting the salvage company with all the details, but their man on the ground, as it were, should have had the full picture going in.

Next Sarah turned the camera on the gaping hole in the side of the plane where the door had come off. Now came the moment of truth. She swam up to the side of the fuselage and shined her light through the windows first. To make sure nothing was lurking inside, she hit the fuselage with her fist, hoping to startle any fish enough that they'd swim off. Sarah was careful to choose an unmarred section of the fuselage, at least a foot away from any visible warping in the metal. Cutting yourself, even the tiniest of scrapes, could be dangerous, both due to the trouble involved getting to the surface for medical attention, and because some sharks could scent even a drop of blood in the water from better than a mile out, and Sarah's little diving knife wasn't exactly going to stop a hammerhead.

No fish swam out of the yawning doorway and Sarah kicked her flipper-feet, positioning herself to haul herself through into the interior.

She tensed in shock, freezing in place momentarily. There was another dead body strapped into a comfy rear-facing leather seat. Sarah felt a chill that had nothing to do with the water temperature. There was a hole in the man's forehead that immediately registered in her mind as gunshot wound, even though she'd never seen one before. Not a fresh one, anyway, nearly skeletonized remains in a WWII wreck didn't count.

She imagined her father was giving Chuck an earful back up on the surface, and Sarah mastered her shock, moving carefully into the interior of the jet. She tried to put shot-dead body out of her mind for the time being. That was a question for later. Right now, she had a laptop to find. There were half a dozen plush leather seats in the passenger compartment, one still occupied, with the cockpit and the other body off to her right. She tread water, turning in place and sending the light around the compartment, memorizing the layout of the wreck.

From Chuck's description of the laptop, she first looked for briefcases, but nothing presented itself. The bathroom door was ajar off to the rear of the plane, and Sarah swam carefully over.

Her heart hammered in her chest, tension filling her before she hauled the door open. Empty. Sarah turned in place again, passing the light over every exposed surface. After a minute or so, she remembered about over-head bins, and went to check those out.

There was a briefcase in one of the bins, but except for a waterlogged copy of _Wired _magazine and a yellow legal pad it was empty. She continued the search, systematically checking every nook and cranny, but didn't find anything out of the ordinary, other than the fact that the plane had indeed been equipped with parachutes, which were thankfully still in a little closet just aft of the cockpit. If one of those chutes had been accidentally deployed by the crash-impact, she might have gotten tangled up in the lines. Sarah had no idea how many chutes the plane was supposed to be carrying, so she couldn't guess if anybody had actually escaped. There were two remaining in that closet.

Her mind kept going back unbidden to the gunshot victim. Somebody had shot him, but who? Had the shooter taken the laptop? Corporate espionage turned bloody? It didn't seem to fit, and Sarah swam back to the gunshot man, and noticed something she'd missed on her first, shocked sight of the man. He had a pistol in a shoulder holster, which was visible now that her swimming around in the wreck had floated open the side of his suit coat.

Sarah wrinkled her nose in disgust, and reached in, fishing the gun out and checking it. She wasn't a gun-nut, but she thought maybe the man's gun might tell them something. Then she winced and cursed inwardly. She should probably check for a wallet or other ID, but she didn't relish the thought of fishing in a dead man's pockets. Still, Roark Instruments would probably need to have positive IDs for legal purposes, and she steeled herself, reaching around to the man's hip pocket. Nothing. Sarah frowned around the pressure regulator and checked his other pockets; more nothing. Finally, she hit paydirt in the man's inside coat pocket. A laminated photo-id that matched up pretty well with the dead man's features. Some fish had been at his flesh around the bullet wound and along his jawline, but he was still recognizeable, thanks to the scar on the right side of his face. Tommy Delgado: Roark Instruments, Internal Security.

Sarah tucked the card into one of the pouches on her belt and went forward to the cockpit. The pilot deserved an ID confirmation as well, she decided.

This other body was in no better condition; he was slumped over the controls and... her heart nearly missed a beat. There were another couple holes in this man's back. Sarah heard a beeping sound and glanced at her dive computer in frustration. Had she really already been down here for half an hour? She mentally berated herself for losing track of time, and checked her air gauge. She still had enough air to get safely to the surface with at least ten minutes of oxygen to spare (she wouldn't even come close to dipping into the air in her smaller emergency tank), but she needed to get started back pronto. Sarah dug in the pilot's pockets and came away quickly with a wallet.

She turned back for the opening in the side and tucked the wallet in the same pouch as dead Tommy's ID and started her ascent. She'd lingered too long at the bottom and now she'd have to stop twice on the way up. Sarah always did a safety stop, but now she'd have to linger for at least five minutes at five meters in addition.

For the first time since the one time a couple years earlier when she'd had to ditch decompressing because there had been sharks circling, Sarah couldn't wait to get up and get out of the water. She usually enjoyed the peace and quiet underwater. Still, the bends was no picnic, and she took her ascent slow, at the approved rate of only a few meters a minute before pausing for her decompression stop. She was practically vibrating with nervous energy by the time her dive computer beeped and gave her the go-ahead to finish surfacing.

When her head broke the surface, she spit out her pressure regulator and tore her mask off. "What the _hell!" _She shouted even before she grabbed the ladder and started climbing aboard.

"We don't know," her father said and helped her back up on deck. "Give the schnook a break," he went on, nodding his head in Chuck's direction. He looked a little green, leaning against the card-table that held the monitors, his hands balled into fists.

"This isn't what I signed up for," Chuck said finally. "Hell, I didn't even really sign up at all. I got roped into doing this because my dad went to college with the head honcho, Mr. Roark himself. I thought..." he trailed off and Sarah frowned.

"What are you thinking?" she asked. He was obviously frustrated, and probably more angry than she was, which Sarah hadn't been expecting.

Chuck grimaced. "We're being set up," he said.

Sarah exchanged a worried glance with her father, and Jack finally broke the silence. "You care to elaborate there, Bartowski?"

"It's a long story," he said.

Jack laughed. "Well, it ain't exactly a short hop back to the marina, Chuck. We got time."

* * *

><p>Chuck and Jack helped Sarah stow her gear before weighing anchor and turning back for Manila. They all crowded into the wheelhouse and Chuck laid out what he knew. True to his word, it was a long story, detailing his father's college run-ins with Theodore Roark, necessarily for his father's viewpoint.<p>

"And you went to work for the bastard?" Jack demanded. Sarah seemed nearly as incredulous, crossing her arms across her chest and shaking her head. There was an eyeroll in there too.

He shrugged. "Call it poetic justice," he said. "I was planning on bankrolling my company with my bonus this year."

Jack laughed. "Well," he said. "I guess you can't be too upset with the man for sticking you with unexpected dead bodies, then, can you?"

Chuck grimaced. "Sure I can. So, what are you thinking?"

"Old college roommates falling out..." Sarah said. "You maybe letting your own past color your thinking?"

Jack arched an eyebrow. "Another long story, Chuck?"

"Not really," he said. "College roommate stole my girlfriend. I broke his nose. End of story."

Jack exchanged a glance with his daughter. "So, that's a yes on letting the past color your thinking. That's the guy sent you the other set of co-ordinates?"

"Yes."

"I don't know..." Jack scratched his chin and made an adjustment in their course. "Seems thin. Don't get me wrong, I understand revenge is highly motivating for some people. But then, the way you tell it, Roark's got a software empire he owes to cheating off your dad in school. If anything, he should feel guilty..."

"That's kind of the impression I got when I spoke to him," Chuck said. "But that was before we found two dead bodies, and no R7 prototype."

"Yeah, that does put a new wrinkle on things," Jack said, staring out at the water with a faraway look in his eyes.

"So, what're you thinking, dad? Corporate espionage?" Sarah leaned back against the window. "That was my first thought, but..."

"You're right. A little bloody for any kind of espionage, outside of the movies," Jack shook his head. "But if somebody stole that laptop... How much is the thing worth, Chuck?"

Chuck shrugged. "No idea. I mean, just the parts, about seven, eight thou. But yeah, maybe one of our competitors might pay pretty handsomely to get their hands on the specs a few months early. High enough to kill over though? Seems kind of outlandish."

"So, what are you going to say in your report when we get back to land?" Jack said. "Maybe I could help you frame things."  
>"Why wait?" Chuck said. "I got a sat antenna built into my laptop. I can email it from about anywhere on earth."<p>

"Nerd," Sarah said.

Chuck conceded the point, nodding. "Yup."

* * *

><p>In short order, with Sarah 'helpfully' pointing out typos over his shoulder and suggesting less confrontational ways to state the facts, they had a report on the attempted salvage operation and the two dead bodies they'd found instead of the laptop prototype. Before Chuck could send it, Sarah surged forward and grabbed his wrist. "Wait," she said, finger stabbing out to delete the part where he mentioned the fact that both men had been shot dead.<p>

"You don't want to tell them about that?" Chuck frowned. "The company needs to know."  
>"Just wait," Sarah insisted. "They knew there'd be bodies on that plane, gunshot wounds might be expected as well."<p>

"What? How would they expect that?"

Sarah shrugged. "Radio didn't look too shot up to me; the pilot might have gotten word out something was badly wrong. Even if it wasn't anything more than an 'oh god, I've been shot,' that would be enough, wouldn't it?" she said, then snapped her fingers in exasperated realization. "I should have grabbed the flight data recorder, and we'd know for sure on that."

"You want to turn around for it?"

Sarah winced and shook her head. "It's already after three, and we're forty five minutes away. Add in dive-time, we'll be getting in after eight o'clock. And all we've got on the boat for dinner are celebratory steaks that would seem a _little _out of place."

Chuck looked back at the email he had composed. "So, you really think somebody took the laptop, and Roark _knew_, and..." he shook his head, trying to make sense of it.

"If the laptop was ever there to begin with," she said.

Chuck's jaw dropped. "But that doesn't even make any sense at all! Why would they kill two of their own employees?"

"I notice you shifted from 'we' to 'they' in describing your boss," Sarah said. "And to answer your question, I don't think they did. There was a third man on that plane, and you got sent co-ordinates for a spot thirty miles north of the scheduled flight-path."

"Oh come on!" Chuck said. "You think _Bryce _killed them? What would he even be doing in the Philippines in your crack-pot theory?"

"You said he works for the state department?"

"Yes, so?"

"It's fairly common for spies to be covered as diplomats. That means, you know, the state department."

Chuck just stared at her. "You're... you think Bryce Larkin from Connecticut is a spy?" He wanted to laugh, but he saw the determined set of her jaw, and knew it wasn't a joke. He let himself fight through his initial reaction of amused disbelief, and really think about Sarah's insane theory. It _was_ insane, wasn't it? He swallowed nervously. Something seemed to click into place. It made more sense than anything they'd come up with yet. It still didn't explain everything, but...

Crap. He sent his Sarah-edited report back to Roark Instruments headquarters. What the hell kind of people was he working for?

TO BE CONTINUED...


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6:

"So," Sarah mused as they walked aft. "You serious about wanting to learn to scuba dive?"

"Sure," Chuck said. "I mean, I said I did, didn't I?"

She shrugged. "Yes, you did. I just thought you were humoring me, trying to... I don't know, get on my good side? There are probably more experienced dive instructors you could learn from."

"I guess you're right, strictly speaking, but I figure I'll at least get the friends discount if I let you teach me."

Sarah arched an eyebrow and watched him dubiously out the corner of her eye. "I wasn't going to charge you," she said. "But now that you mention it..."

Chuck grinned. "Well, at least my Roark Instruments expense account will come in handy for something."

"You think he'll mind if you charge a couple extra lessons?"

"At this point, I'm not sure I care," Chuck said. "Yeah, a couple extra lessons on the tab should be fine. Like twenty or so?"

That made her laugh. "I was thinking more of a 'misdemeanor' sized fraud, Chuck. Most successful criminal careers start small."

"I suppose I'll just have to defer to the criminal mastermind on that one," he said. And then frowned when she froze up momentarily. "What did I say?"

"No, nothing," Sarah said, shaking her head. "Forget about it."

He didn't know what to make of that, but tried to shrug it off. "So, Professor Walker," Chuck said, trying to turn the conversation back away from the dangerous topic, "what is your next lesson for this young Grasshopper?"

Sarah frowned. "Grasshopper?"

"Well, there goes the rest of your nerd-credit. You don't know Kung-Fu?"

"I take a KFM self-defense class once a week," Sarah said. "Does that count?"

"No, the TV show. Wait, seriously? That's what Batman uses."

"There was a TV show called Kung-Fu? And I knew that about Batman Begins; it's why I switched over from aikido. How's my nerd-credit doing now?"

"Careful there, Sarah," Chuck said. "Or I might just propose marriage again."

She rolled her eyes. "You could at least take me out to dinner first."

"Well, now that you mention it," he said, digging out his phone. "My expense account is just screaming to be used and abused. What's the fanciest place I can get reservations for on short notice?"

"Wait, you're serious?"

"Deadly," Chuck said. "Right, no signal out here. I'll go bring up Yelp on my laptop and figure something out." He turned on his heel and headed back toward the wheelhouse.

Sarah hesitated for a moment, and then ducked downstairs. She wasn't going to let him distract her like that; it set a bad precedent. Fancy restaurant or no, if she was going to teach him how to scuba dive, she was going to do it right. That meant dusting off her old textbooks on the subject.

Digging through the old steamer trunk at the foot of her bed, Sarah turned up her speargun, which she tossed aside carelessly, along with the bright orange backpack holding her survival kit. Finally she unearthed the set of expensive diving books and technical manuals.

She kicked the speargun under her bed and headed back up on deck to the wheelhouse, where Chuck was deep in conversation with her father about the best place in the Philippines for sushi.

Sarah wrinkled her nose, none too thrilled with the idea, "I had sushi yesterday," she protested, "what about Italian?"

Chuck stared at her incredulously. "But... that's... really? Here we are in the south pacific, and you want Italian food?"

"Berroni's Pizza is probably the best in the islands," Sarah said, then shrugged. "Or, it's my favorite anyway."

Jack shook his head, "Darlin," he said in a mildly scolding tone, "The idea here is for us to go someplace we normally wouldn't. I'm thinking the Champagne Room at the Manila Hotel. You like French food, Chuck?"

"That's fine," he said. "I just... I don't know, my first night out I expected some kind of eastern food."

"Well," Jack said with a grin. "Last time I checked, Paris is East of LA by a fair margin."

"Fine," Sarah said, surrendering to the inevitable. "But that means I need to dress up. You going to spring for that too?"

"Why not?" Chuck said. "The limit on my expense account is still pretty far off."

She shook her head helplessly. "Your boss is going to have a conniption when he sees the receipts," Chuck's laptop made a funny little beep, and Sarah blinked at it. "Was that..."

"R2-D2, yes," Chuck grinned and fiddled with the touchpad. "I've got an email, hang on one second... that's odd."

"What's up," Jack said.

"It's a reply to my report," Chuck explained, "But it's straight from Teddy Roark's personal email. It's gotta be... really late, over there, right?"

"We're fifteen hours ahead," Sarah said, checking her watch. "I think... yeah, it's half-past four here; that makes it 1:30 am back in LA LA land."

Jack let out a low whistle. "Somebody's working late," he mused. "Think your report riled him up a little?"

Chuck turned the screen so the Walkers could read over his shoulder. "The timing is a little odd," he allowed.

_**Chuck,**_

_**Sorry about the mixup, don't know what happened there. Heads will roll (figuratively anyway, haha), and we'll need to pull the plane up to see if our internal security guys can figure out where the laptop went. Good work so far. Why don't you take the Salvage people out to dinner and see if they're up for that job? Otherwise, you're on vacation for two weeks, on me. Act like it. I want that expense account maxed, kid.**_

_**Teddy**_

Jack grinned crookedly, "And the content is indicative as well, isn't it."

Chuck wasn't so sure. "I don't know," he said. "But, that's the problem with emails, isn't it? You can't tell if they're flat out lying to you.

Sarah pointed to the screen. "Like how he glossed over two dead bodies? You weren't really demanding answers, just asking—politely—but still, it's thin as far as explanations go. Lots of bland reassurances, but no facts. I think the expense account thing is to bribe you into not asking any more questions."

"And to keep tabs on your activities. Plus the bit about taking us to dinner," Jack said. "It's couched as a suggestion, but that's probably an order."

That was worth a nod. "Yeah," Chuck said. "Since we didn't mention the gunshots, he probably wants to do something about the bullets. If all the police shows on TV are any guide, that's the only forensics that'll be any good."

"So," Jack said. "This is some kind of criminal conspiracy then. We're in agreement?"

"I think—" Chuck started, then stopped and shook his head. "No, I'm sure there's _something _illegal going on, even leaving out the killings. Question is, who do we call?"

"One other thing," Sarah said. "If we do pull the plane off the bottom, who'll be waiting for us? Local cops are kind of notorious for taking bribes. We might be on the hook for those bodies if we're not careful."

Chuck's grin didn't touch his eyes. "So, you're saying you'll take the job?"

"No," Sarah said, before Jack could interject. "But we'll check out those co-ordinates your ex-BFF sent you. And that's not going on any expense account statement."

Chuck pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to fight off the headache he knew was coming. "I dont think I'm cut out for this kind of thing. All this intrigue just makes my head hurt."

Jack laughed at that. "Seems like you're doing okay," he shrugged. "Kind of goes with the territory in our line of work, don't it kiddo?"

Sarah had to nod along, "The prospect of pulling a shipment of gold off the bottom of the ocean brings in all kinds."

"But this is just computer parts," Chuck explained.

"Probably," Jack said. "And there's an awful lot of wiggle room in _probably_. You mind letting me take a look at those co-ordinates? We're down to about half our bunkerage; wouldn't do us any favors to run out of deisel, would it?"

Chuck shook his head, and handed over the post-it Sarah had written the co-ordinates on. "No, that would certainly put a damper on my 'vacation.'"

"Come on," Sarah said, closing the lid on Chuck's laptop and plopping her armload of diving books down. "We can worry about conspiracies later, you've got a test in an hour."

"You're not even joking a little bit, are you?"

"Hey, if you want me to certify you to dive down for whatever is at those co-ordinates, you gotta hit the books," she said.

Chuck grumbled and cracked the first book open. Jack shook his head. "The table in the galley is bigger, if you want to spread out."

They relocated belowdecks, and Sarah was true to her word, even going so far as timing him with a stopwatch. Chuck managed to scrape an eighty-nine on his preliminary dive-safety exam, which was a pass, but marginal as far as Sarah was concerned. He wasn't the least surprised to find her something of a perfectionist in that regard, and she drilled him unmercifully for another hour. Thankfully Sarah didn't have a different version of the test ready, nor did she trust him not to have memorized the answers, so they reached the marina before he was subjected to another test. He'd decided not to pursue a post-graduate degree at Stanford for any number of reasons, but test-taking was pretty high up on the list. Chuck didn't like the stress, even if he usually did well, and he remembered waking up in a cold sweat both before and _after_ exams which he'd turned out to have aced.

One in particular his senior year had given him the oddest nightmares for a week. However, when he tried to explain that to Sarah, she'd merely said 'good,' and kept hammering facts into his head.

It was a relief when he felt more than heard the thrum of the big marine diesel engines cut off and the boat lurched slightly as it came to a stop.

"Land," Chuck said. "Freedom!"

Sarah scowled. "It wasn't that bad, was it?"

"If I buy you a fancy dress can I not answer that question ever?"

She tried to keep scowling, but the corner of her mouth twitched up against her will. "I'm trying to condense six hours of classroom time into two; it's not easy on me either."

"Fair enough," Chuck said. "Fancy dress time?"

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Yes, okay. But you have to wear a tux."

"That wasn't part of the deal."

She adopted a deep, gravelly voice. "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further." Chuck groaned and Sarah grinned crookedly, "You can't set me up like that, Chuck. I'm going to hit it out of the park every time."

"Well, at least I got to be Lando in that quote. That's something."

Sarah led the way back up on deck and they helped Jack tie off to the dock, before heading into the marina parking lot.

Then, of course, they hit a snag. Sarah's Jeep only had two seats. "I'm not sitting in your lap," Chuck said immediately to Jack, who just laughed it off.

"Let's put a taxi on that expense account of yours, how's that sound?"

* * *

><p>"Seriously?" Sarah said later, her voice carrying from her stall in the changing rooms. The store Sarah had selected only had the one set of rooms, and Chuck was donning his off-the-rack tuxedo in the next stall. "What was your next move if dad hadn't suggested the taxi?"<p>

"Well, I certainly wasn't going to let you sit in my lap," Chuck said.

"Let me?" Sarah scoffed. "Sure, your word choice isn't telling _at all_."

"Hey, excuse me if I'm not used to the idea of throwing money around like this," Chuck said defensively. "You ever try to take a taxi in LA? You're lucky if they don't take the shirt off your back."

"That's not exactly an LA exclusive, Chuck," Sarah shot back. "You mind zipping me up?"

"Ah," Chuck said. "Yeah about that. I don't think that's a good idea for any number of reasons, your father being chief among them. Do you want me to go down the rest of the list? ."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "I doubt he'd object to you helping me put clothes _on_, Chuck; come on."

Chuck peeked out of the stall nervously and walked two steps to the door to Sarah's changing room. "Will you protect me if your dad tries to knock my block off?" The door swung open and Sarah presented her back, holding her hair out of the way with one hand.

"Zip it, Bartowski," Sarah said. "And I mean that both ways." Her dress was a deep blue, he noticed, trying unsuccessfully to limit himself to that one glance. He spotted the back of a black lace bra and immediately looked straight up.

His hand shook slightly, but he managed to get the zipper up where it needed to go without making more of a fool of himself.

Sarah turned and the grin froze on her face. Chuck's jaw dropped into a similar expression. Finally Sarah reached up to straighten Chuck's tie and the moment was broken after only a handful of awkward seconds. "Hey, looking good, you two," Jack said from the entrance to the changing rooms. "I wish I had my camera; I never did get to play photog for Sarah at any high school dances."

She grumbled something under her breath, "Thanks dad, way to advertise what a misfit I was in school."

"Don't feel bad," Chuck said. "I didn't go to my prom either. I was in the State science fair semi-finals."

"Because that makes it better?" Sarah said. "At least you had an excuse."

"You had your reasons, Darlin," Jack said defensively. Sarah shot him a look, and Chuck frowned at the byplay, unable to make heads or tails of the exchange.

"On that note," Chuck said. "Our carriage still awaits, and his rates are pretty outrageous, even if the company is paying them."

"You realize your company is probably setting you up for two murders?" Jack said. "Just wanted to make sure you remembered that."

Chuck sighed. "I do," he said. "Its not any kind of loyalty to my employer, okay? Its just... force of habit I guess? I had to be pretty miserly in school, once dad skipped; I know I shouldn't be worried about money right now, but I can't exactly turn it off either. If I don't worry about that, it just leaves the other thing, and I'm trying _not_ to think about the gunshot victims we found at the bottom of the South China Sea."

"I can understand that," Jack said. "It's hardly favorite subject either. But don't let yourself forget about it too long."

"Like that's gonna happen anytime soon," Chuck said. Sarah nodded agreement. He rolled his eyes. "And on that note, who's still hungry? At all."

* * *

><p>They managed to be just on time for their online-reservation at seven o'clock, and were seated almost immediately. Jack grabbed the wine list and ordered for them, without giving Chuck a chance to glance at the prices. He became more concerned when there weren't any prices listed on the menu itself, and then mentally berated himself. It was Roark's money, and the man had flat out told him to indulge himself. Before the waiter even came back with the wine Jack had ordered, his coat buzzed. He pulled out his cell-phone and glanced at it. "Sorry, kids. I've got to take this," he said and slipped out from his chair, phone to his ear.<p>

Chuck and Sarah's eyes followed her father briefly, long enough to spot him flagging down their waiter before he swept out of sight. A minute or so later, a busboy came to remove Jack's place setting. Chuck and Sarah exchanged a look. "Oh hell," Chuck said. "Did this just turn into a date?"

Sarah let her head fall into her cupped hands. "I'm going to kill my dad," she said earnestly.

"So now probably isn't the time to say how amazing you look in that dress?"

She glared at him for a moment through her fingers, and then opened her mouth with a pithy rejoinder on her lips when the wine arrived. "Saved by the bell," she said instead.

The waiter poured a little taste of white wine for Chuck, who sipped and then glanced at the bottle. He wasn't a connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, but it was probably the best wine he'd ever tasted. Sarah spotted the pleased look on his face and grabbed the wine list.

"Mmm," he said. "That's really good."

Sarah grinned when she matched up the label with the entry on the wine list. It was more of a book, than a list, anyway, but it was the most expensive one on that particular page. "It better be," she said and turned the list so Chuck could see it, tapping the page. He paled visibly, and nodded for the waiter to pour full glasses.

That broke the ice, and Chuck finally managed to get the cost of the meal out of his head. Once he and Sarah decided on their entrees, he even asked the waiter for the best pairing for their meals. He didn't bother to check the prices on the wine list, and when the man started to suggest a cheaper label, Chuck waved the man off.

Sarah tried to hide the smile this caused. While they waited for their food, they sipped their wines and mostly confined themselves with chitchat, talking about places they'd been. Chuck got her talking some about interesting dives that Walker Marine Salvage had gone on, and time seemed to fly by.

After dessert, when the waiter brought the check, he tossed his corporate credit card without looking at the check. "Give yourself a healthy tip," Chuck said. "I'd rather not know what the damage was."

The waiter froze at that pronouncement, and eyed Chuck like he was some kind of strange new creature.

Chuck refused to look at the price when he signed the receipt, though Sarah smirked and pried his fingers off the itemized list, her curiosity getting the better of her. She winced, over theatrically he thought, and let him shut the bill away in the little leather credit-card holder.

"So," she said on the way out the door. "I know we were kind of joking around about dates and all, but..."

"Uh-oh," Chuck said.

Sarah narrowed her eyes. "Hey, let me finish," she protested, "We're actually not that far from a club I know."

"Was there a question in there? I'm not the worlds' best dancer or anything," Chuck warned.

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Who is?"

"Manny Dancington," Chuck said. "Widely known fact."

"Oh, a 'fact' is it?" she snorted. "I'll believe that when I see it."

"Okay, hang on one second," Chuck said, pulling out his phone. There was a suspicious amount of typing involved just to pull up wikipedia, before he handed over the phone.

Sure enough, there was an article for 'Manny Dancington,' but she wasn't buying it. "I didn't just fall off the turnip truck yesterday, Chuck," Sarah scrolled down to the bottom, and pointed to the creation date on the article. "And I assume you're cbart12?"

"It was worth a shot," Chuck said. "Seeing is believing and all..."

"You're stalling."

"Tsk," he said. "Nicely spotted, Walker. Alright, a-dancing we will go, but under protest," Chuck hailed a cab and let Sarah direct the cabbie to the dance club.

It was only a ten minute cab ride, traffic had thinned out somewhat since darkness and the cabbie drove far too sedately for Sarah's taste. She griped at the man in Tagalog for taking the roundabout route, and he apologized in English, dropping them outside the club and only grumbling briefly about being forced to write out a receipt for Chuck's expense account. The super-sized tip Chuck left him probably helped somewhat in that regard. He was surprising himself a little; spending money was much more fun when it wasn't yours.

Chuck ditched the more noticeable parts of his tux, cummerbunds and bow-ties not necessarily being 'hip' enough for a dance club and let Sarah lead the way upstairs to the club. Chuck spotted the sign, Republiq, shrugged it off. Spelling wasn't everybody's cup of tea.

The club itself was pretty nice, although Chuck's ability to gauge that kind of thing was notoriously bad. He hadn't been out to a nightclub since Morgan had dragged him out after Jill had dumped him. Chuck shook his head and grimaced, hoping Sarah hadn't noticed. No such luck.

"Something wrong?" she turned to face him fully. "This is probably the most popular nightclub in town. We're really lucky we got in."

Chuck managed a grin. "Yeah, not so much. You remember I said you looked amazing? May have been under selling it. They probably would have let us in even if they had to kick people out to appease the fire marshals."  
>"They don't call them that here," Sarah said.<p>

"Not the point, Sarah," Chuck said.

"I know, I was distracting you while I got you to the bar. Next on the distraction agenda: two martinis, please!" she had to shout over the live band to be heard by the bartender.

"Liquid courage?" Chuck said in her ear. "I'm not _that_ bad a dancer."

Sarah grinned. "That remains to be seen," she said, turning with the drinks and nodding toward Chuck when the bartender said something, probably about payment. He dutifully pulled his corporate card and paid for the drinks. Chuck turned to Sarah for the protocol on opening a tab, when she stiffened suddenly.

He didn't have to read her lips to know it was a curse that would never have made onto network television. Chuck's eyebrows went up, sure he'd only known her for a day, but she didn't strike him as someone who used that sort of language lightly. "What's wrong?" Chuck leaned in to ask.

"Hey there gorgeous," a man's booming voice said. Chuck turned and grimaced. The man was tall, but maybe an inch or so shorter than Chuck's six-three, and well-muscled. He wasn't thick, like a body-builder, but Chuck was suddenly self-conscious about not hitting the gym more than once a week. The man had dark hair with lighter tips, and a leer on his face, until he spotted Chuck and the two drinks Sarah was holding. "What're you doing with my girl?" he demanded.

Chuck turned to Sarah. "Wait, what? You have a boyfriend?" He snatched one of the martini's and drained most of it in one slurp. "That's better," he said, slurring slightly.

She winced at Chuck's reaction. "He's not my boyfriend. Garett, you're _not _my boyfriend. We've been over this. Don't make me get a restraining order."

"Listen," Garett started, grabbing Sarah's arm. Chuck had heard the magic words 'restraining order,' and they'd combined to finish off two bottles of wine at dinner, coupled with the martini he'd just downed, his better judgment took a holiday. Chuck grabbed Garett's wrist and yanked, trying to make him let go of Sarah's arm.

He hadn't considered what to do about the man's other arm, and the fist in the eye came as a thoroughly unwelcome surprise. Chuck stumbled back a step, reeling from the blow and throwing a fist of his own which glanced off Garett's shoulder. The shorter man turned with the blow and Chuck staggered forward past him, turning as fast as he could regain his balance.

Garett was advancing in what looked disturbingly like a martial arts stance of some kind both hands up. Chuck flinched and managed to duck the first punch, and though he could see the next one coming, he was caught flat-footed. He was already tensing up to take a punch right in the nose when Garett's breath went out of him in a rush.

Chuck jumped back a step, hopefully out of range of further attack, and spotted a rather dainty blue strappy shoe protruding from between Garett's legs. The shoe disappeared, and Garett collapsed as if that had been all that held him up.

"He's really not my boyfriend," Sarah said from her position behind the downed man, twitching her skirts back into place after the kick.

"Thanks," Chuck said, just before a meaty hand grabbed him by the collar. "Hey, what?"

Two bouncers picked Garett up off the floor and Chuck found himself being manhandled quickly through the door. A second man appeared as if by magic at his left side, and he and Garett were both unceremoniously ejected from the club. It all happened faster than he expected, and a fifth bouncer stood between them, twenty yards apart, in case either tried to start throwing punches again. "Listen," Chuck said. "I was just defending myself... and my date," his brain was still muddled and he shook his head.

"Sir, you're drunk," the nearest bouncer said.

"I'm not drunk," Chuck protested. "Seriously, I'm not."

"You're a little drunk," Sarah said holding her thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. Had they hauled her out of the club as well?

"Really?" Chuck said, and she nodded.

"Ma'am," the bouncer said politely. "Who started the fight?" Sarah pointed vehemently toward Garett, who was all but being held up by the two bouncers that had hauled him off the floor. The bouncer nodded toward Chuck. "He's not driving, is he," it wasn't really a question, though it was phrased as one.

"We took a cab here," Chuck said, helpfully, he thought.

The bouncer-in-the-middle nodded, and the others released Chuck.

Garett was starting to come around, "Lemme go," he said, and the middle bouncer turned to Sarah.

"You pressing charges?"

"No, just wait until we're gone and let him go?"

"That's the plan," the bouncer said. "We already called you a cab."

Sarah helped Chuck down the stairs to the street. "How are you less drunk than me," Chuck said.

"I had a glass out of each bottle," she explained. "You did the rest."

"No, I only had a couple," Chuck protested.

"The sommolier kept coming by and refilling your glass," Sarah said.

"Oh, I missed that, I guess. Also, my face hurts," Chuck said.

"I'll bet," Sarah shook her head and genty brushed his hair out of his eyes. "Let's get you back to your hotel, how's that sound?"

"Shleepy."

Sarah waved down the cabbie and gave him directions back to Chuck's hotel.

"So, your boyfriend has a mean right cross," Chuck said in the cab.

"I told you, he's not my boyfriend," Sarah said. "We went out on a couple of dates a few months ago, but he turned out to be a big jerk."  
>"I know. He punched me right in the face."<p>

"Not what I was referring to, but yes, he did," Sarah said.

Chuck turned to look at her and she sighed. "Worse jerk than the punching? That doesn't sound good."

"Yeah," Sarah said. "Just a piece of advice, always find out what somebody does for a living before you decide to date them."

Chuck blinked. "That's kind of a nuns equator."

"A what?"

"A thingy that is a odd change of topic," Chuck said carefully.

"Oh, a non sequitur. No, not really," she said. "It's why I didn't press charges. He's_ sort of_ a lieutenant in the local mob. I didn't want to put a target on your back."

"Wait," Chuck said, suddenly feeling much more sober than just seconds ago. "Say that again, please? You dated a mobster?"

"We only went out twice," Sarah said defensively, "It wasn't serious."  
>"That's not..." Chuck stopped, trying to rephrase his concerns effectively was taxing his alcohol muddled brain-parts. "I mean. You kicked a mobster in the unmentionables, Sarah. I'm drunk, and I know that's not a great idea."<p>

"Oh," she said. "I guess I didn't think that through very well, did I?"

"Stop the car, I think I'm going to be sick."

Sarah thought for a moment he was joking, and when she realized he wasn't, she relayed that to the cabdriver as quick as she could. It was almost fast enough.

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

><p>AN: This chapter was kind of schizophrenic, moving around a lot in setting and tone, which mostly explains why it took so long to get on 'paper.' I think it turned out pretty good though; what do you think? Drop me a review.


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: So, my internet was down all weekend, and all I have to show for it is this chapter. And half of 8. And 1/3 of Frontier 32. Please don't all wish me internet outages at once. I'm superstitious.

* * *

><p>Chapter 7:<p>

"Rrrrgh," Chuck grumbled, when consciousness returned, bringing with it a hangover such as he hadn't experienced since his fraternity days at Stanford. He blinked awake slowly.

"Well, somebody isn't a morning person." He was suddenly wide awake, and staring unblinking at Sarah Walker, who was, alarmingly, sharing a bed with him.

Chuck grabbed the bedclothes and peeked under them at himself, "Oh, thank god," he breathed upon finding himself still clothed. He shook his head and managed a chuckle. "Well, that's a first."

Sarah arched an eyebrow, "What is?"

"Guy wakes up in bed with a beautiful woman and thanks god they _didn't _have sex."

She laughed, and Chuck winced, clutching a hand to his head. Sarah lowered her voice. "Yeah, I don't know whether to be flattered or not. You're sending kind of mixed signals there, Chuck. Here, aspirin," she held out the pills and a bottle of water.

"What time is it?"

"Almost ten in the morning," she said.

He waited until he swallowed the pills to voice his next concern. "Do I remember getting punched by your boyfriend?"

"No," she said. "We were never you know 'boyfriend-girlfriend;' we went out a couple times. He's one of those guys who isn't used hearing no."

"So, kind of the anti-chuck," he said.

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Absolutely, but not in the way you're talking about. Garett usually makes great first impressions. And then you realize what a bastard he is after the fact."

"Whereas I show up to answer the door in boxer shorts?"

"Well, you clean up nice," Sarah said. "And you made sure to miss my shoes when you puked in the cab. And I like that in a man."

"Oh god," Chuck put his head in his hands. "I threw up?"

"Granted, I had just told you how my 'ex' was involved in local organized crime; I think that had something to do with it. Did you just whimper?"

Chuck frowned. "You didn't strike me as the kind of girl who would date gangsters."

"I'm not," she said, with a shrug. "Finding that out was just one of the many reasons I walked out midway through the second date."

"Don't get defensive," Chuck said. "I didn't mean that to sound as accusing as it did. You don't owe me an explanation."

"I wasn't—" Sarah puffed her bangs out of her face. "Okay, I guess that was a little defensive. Look, we're kind of down a path here, and I've had time to think about some things."

"Down a path?"

"Well— okay, we've got a multi-national corporation that might have it out for us on one side, your old friend at the 'state department' on another side, and a local mobster with delusions of being my boyfriend on the other. And to top it all off, my dad didn't come home last night, and he's not answering his cell," Sarah said. "We need to be on the same page if we're going to get through this, right?"

Chuck was silent for a long time, before he nodded. "Okay," he said. "Any more skeletons in the closet?"

"None that are relevant," she said.

Chuck blinked. "When did you change clothes?" She was wearing a white button down shirt and khaki shorts similar to what she'd worn the first time he'd laid eyes on her.

"I didn't spend the night," Sarah said. "Once I was sure you weren't going to puke again and choke and die in your sleep, I went home. I stole your key so I could get back in this morning. Also, I had a chat with the day-manager on my way up. If you want, we can use the hotel pool for your practical training."

He shook his head in wonder. "How do you just change gears like that. Your dad is _missing_? What?"

"He can take care of himself; if he's not answering his cell phone, all it means is he's worried the local cops are after him. The situation remains the same. If we want to get through this, we need to find whatever is at those coordinates before anybody else. I can't make you a diving expert in two hours, but I can at least get you trained enough to help me out if I need it."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Chuck said. "Slow down. Does your dad have to ditch the cops _often?"_

"No, nothing like that," Sarah admitted. "He's kind of paranoid though, and sometimes he drops 'off the grid' as he calls it. The timing is a little inconvenient for us is all."

"I need a drink," Chuck said. "Or at least a shower."

"I'll order you up some breakfast from room service," Sarah said, reaching for the bedside phone.

Chuck shuffled into the bathroom, and Sarah, good as her word, ordered a hearty breakfast for both of the. She was in the process of hanging up the room phone, when she heard another phone ring. She instinctively checked her own cell, when she recognized the familiar strains of the Imperial March, which she'd assigned to her father's number.

But her phone was silent, and she tracked down Chuck's phone, which was blaring the tune. Sarah chewed her lip for a moment, before scooping up the phone. The contact-picture was a portrait of a pretty brunette, smiling into the camera. Finally, she bit the bullet and answered. "Chuck's phone," she said.

"Who the hell is this!" a woman's voice demanded. "Where's Chuck?"

"He's, uh... in the shower," Sarah answered honestly before she stopped to think about it. "Oh, god. You're not his wife are you?" I'm gonna kill him!

"What— _god _no, I'm his sister, Ellie."

"Oh, good," Sarah said. She'd had a momentary pang of fear, that her judgment in regard to men had been totally destroyed by her failure to identify Garett properly a few months previously for the scum he was.

"Oh my god," Chuck's sister exclaimed. "What time is it there? This is... did you sleep over?"

"What? I— I—" Sarah's eyes went wide. She should have let his phone go to voice mail. Idiot! Why had she answered the phone, damn it? She banged her head against the heel of her hand. "Chuck's told me so much about you," she said. That's what you said at a moment like this right? Even if— she couldn't remember if he _had _mentioned a sister— if he hadn't, it might get her off the hook for answering Chuck's phone at such a suggestive hour.

"Really," Chuck's sister Ellie said from half-way around the world. "He hasn't mentioned you..."

"Sarah," she said, and grimaced. "We actually just met... it's kind of a... complicated situation."

"Are you a hooker?"

Sarah nearly choked on her tongue. "Wh— of _course _not! How dare you!"

"I'm so sorry," the woman said. "Its just, it's been a long since Chuck's had a girlfriend, and... God, I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that."

"I, listen, Ellie," Sarah said. She didn't really know why she kept telling the woman the truth, it was a bad habit to get into. "Nothing happened. We went out on, I guess it was a date, and Chuck had a little too much to drink. I wanted to make sure he was okay, so I dropped by this morning to check up on him."

"Oh," she sounded a little... disappointed. "He's a really good guy, don't let all the nerd-speak drive you away."

"I'll take it under advisement," Sarah said, grinning. "But I make no guarantees."

"I guess that's the best I can hope for. But if you break his heart," Ellie said, "remember, I'm a surgeon."

Sarah's eyes widened. She probably would have remembered if Chuck had mentioned that. Then her head turned. "Oh, crap, the shower just cut off," she whispered. "Can you call back and pretend—"

"We never had this conversation," Ellie said. "Gotcha. It might be tomorrow though, my break is almost over, I'm on call tonight, and I'm still figuring out the time difference. It's six am there?"

"10. We're fifteen ahead. I'll bite the bullet and just hand over the phone, if you need to talk to Chuck?" Sarah said.

"No, awkward morning after a first date is punishment enough; awkward phone call from overbearing sibling on top of it is just_ mean_. Hopefully we'll get to talk again sometime, bye Sarah."

"Bye," Sarah said, and made sure she disconnected the line before dropping his phone back where she'd gotten it.

A knock came at the door, and she stood, walking around the bed to answer. Room service, probably. Only, no one was there, and Sarah looked down the hall in confusion until the knocking came again. It was the bathroom door. "Chuck? What's up?"  
>"I left my bag outside," he said through the door. "With my... you know. My clothes? Would you mind?"<p>

Sarah pursed her lips to fight down a smile. "It's not like I haven't seen it before, Chuck."

"Could you please be serious for like two minutes?"

"Okay," She said, scooping up Chuck's small suitcase and holding it out. The door opened a crack, and Sarah tapped her watch with her free hand. "But know that you're on the clock. You got one minute fifty seconds of serious left."

Chuck's hand darted out and grabbed his suitcase, then he disappeared back into the bathroom. Sarah sat on the side of the bed. "Hurry up, you don't have to fix your hair all nice, Chuck," she said. "We're going straight to the pool."

He got dressed in record time, and came out with his hair still dripping wet. "How exactly did you convince the management to let us scuba dive in the swimming pool?"

This time the knock on the door was followed by a voice. "Room service!"

Sarah grinned and produced Chuck's corporate credit card, flipping it through her fingers as she went to the door. "Oh, look what I 'found,'" she said. Then, after the usual business of a tip for the guy with the room service cart, Sarah sat down and grabbed one of the plates heaped with bacon and eggs. "Uh," Chuck said, "aren't you supposed to wait like an hour after you eat before you go swimming?"  
>"Oh... yeah," Sarah said. "I forgot. Well, you've got a microwave. You can re-heat yours," she grinned and crunched a strip of bacon between her teeth and then began shoveling food into her mouth.<p>

"Good lord, woman," Chuck said not even a minute later once she was finished. "Where do you put it all?"

She shrugged and wiped the corner of her mouth with a cloth napkin. "Swimming burns a lot of calories. Alright, you ready?"

"Can I have my credit card back, now?"

Sarah's spare set of dive gear was down in the Jeep, and she made Chuck lug it out back of the hotel parking structure to the pool area. "Why am I the pack-mule all of a sudden?" he grumbled.

"You're the one diving," Sarah explained. "That means, you get to carry the dive gear. It's like fishing or hunting; if you catch it, you've got to clean it, right? Didn't your dad teach you that?"

"Dad never was much for outdoor sports," Chuck said, "He was always busy in his workshop."

"You never said what he did for a living. Sorry," Sarah said, remembering. "Touchy subject. I forgot."

"No, it's alright," Chuck said while Sarah reached over the wrought iron gate to let them into the fenced-in pool. "Kind of the same business I'm in, computer and electrical engineering mostly. I do know he helped design the operating system that Predator drones use."

"Wow," Sarah said. "That's cool."

"Yeah, you should see the Roark Instruments Remote Controlled car sometime."

"What's so..." she started. "Oh, wait, you mean like... real, full size car?"

"The current prototype is a humvee," Chuck said, "But I think their project lead says next they're bidding on an old APC or something."

"Okay, into the pool, Chuck," Sarah said, "And we'll start the lesson."

"What if I run out of air?"

"Stand up?" Sarah pointed to the nearby depth markings. "It only goes down to five feet. Anyway you're not starting off with the tanks just yet."

"Ah," Chuck said, fighting down embarrassment.

"Anyway, we'll start you out— have you ever been snorkeling before?"

"No, not really," he said.

"Okay," Sarah tossed a mask and snorkel at him.

Sarah only dangled her feet over the side through the first hour of his lesson, even though the pool was shallow enough that the whole 'don't eat before you swim' advisory wasn't particularly important. Chuck had already graduated to strapping on the tanks, so Sarah decided it was time she join him in the pool. But when she got up to strip down to her bikini, her phone started ringing.

"Oh, I think that's my phone," Chuck said.

Sarah shook her head. "No, it's mine."

"We have the same ring tone?" Chuck grinned. "Must be fate."

"Oh, hush," Sarah rolled her eyes and answered the phone. "Yeah, dad, what's up?" Her face blanched.

"What's wrong," Chuck said immediately, but Sarah held up a hand for him to wait.

"Is he alright?" she asked. "Okay, okay. What's the address there? Thank you. Alright, I'll do that."

"Everything okay?"

"My dad's in the hospital," she explained. "That was the head nurse. I'm in his phone as his 'In Case of Emergency' contact."

"Did they tell you what happened?"

"No, just that he was in serious condition," Sarah said. "I need to go check on him; sorry, but I guess we'll have to cut this short."

"You mind if I come with you?"

"I— really?" Sarah asked. "You don't have to do that, I'm fine."

"Your dad seems like a nice guy," Chuck said. "I'm worried about him too."

Sarah frowned at him for a moment, then shook her head. "Okay, let's go."

* * *

><p>After a Jeep ride that made their trip to the Marina the day before seem like a lazy-Sunday drive through the countryside, they arrived at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. It only took a brief angry staring match with the nurse at Receiving to get Chuck and Sarah in to see Jack, even though it wasn't technically visiting hours. Chuck kept glancing warily at her out of the corner of his eye after that on the elevator ride up to Jack's room on the fourth floor.<p>

"Relax," Sarah finally said. "I'm just worried, and I promise I'm not going to take it out on you, okay, Chuck?"

"Yeah, alright," Chuck said. The elevator doors opened and they set off down the hall, finding Jack's room easily enough. It was the one with the chastened-looking nurse retreating, bedpan in-hand.

"Hey, dad," Sarah said.

Jack grinned from the hospital bed, bandages around his temples and one hand, and more around his ribs. His grin faltered momentarily when he spotted Chuck at her side, but she didn't think Chuck himself noticed.

"Are you alright, Mr. Walker?" Chuck said.

"Call me Jack, I already told you that, didn't I?" Jack grimaced. "And let's say I've had better weekends, okay, but I'm going to be fine. The doctors say I've got a concussion, so I've got to stay here over night, but I'm going to be fine."

"What happened?" Sarah said, moving to her father's bedside.

Jack grimaced, and his eyes darted from Sarah's to Chuck and back. "It's... god this is embarrassing. I owe fifty grand to my bookie."

"You _what?_" Sarah said, finding that a little hard to swallow.

"Look, I'm sorry, darlin' I didn't want to tell you, cause, well, I just didn't okay. I'm sorry, I am, but, it's too late for that. Look, Chuck, I'm sorry. I gave them those coordinates of yours. I figured whatever's there has got to be worth enough to keep them off my back for—"

Chuck's face was red, and he glared daggers at Jack, and at her, too, Sarah could see. He turned on his heel and walked out. When the door shut behind him, Jack turned on Sarah. "Why'd you have to bring the schnook, kid?"

Sarah glared at her father. "He was worried about you," Jack grimaced. Sarah didn't give him time to recover. "Okay, dad. What really happened?"

Jack grunted. "Armenians," he said. "The same crew I stole the quarter mil from back in California. Somebody must have tipped them off; they found me last night. And after they started in on my fingers, I told them about the R7. It's gotta be worth at least twice what I owe them to the right buyer; their local gomer bought my story, and I told them the thing was at those coordinates Chuck gave me. Not my finest bit of work but at least we've got a window to get the heck out of dodge, sweetheart."

"And what about Chuck?" Sarah demanded. "He's in this thing up to his neck. Maybe not as deep as you are with the mob, but still."

"What about him, darlin? Worse comes to worst, he can skip back to LA, can't he?"

"I can understand you not knowing _him _very well, dad," Sarah said sharply, standing and heading for the door herself. "But I have a hard time understanding how you don't know _me _better than that." She turned back just for a moment in the doorway. "If you want to skip town, once the doctors let you out of here, go ahead. I'm taking the boat out."

"Kiddo," Jack said. "Wait, one last thing..."

Sarah arched an eyebrow.

Sarah was fuming as she started up the Jeep and headed around the front of the hospital. She knew her dad was always looking out for himself, and the threat of the East Coast mob tracking them down had always been a sort of back-burnered low-level fear for almost ten years, but she just couldn't stand it. Chuck had confided in them almost from the start, trusted them, let them into the details of this strange corporate (maybe regular) espionage case when he didn't have to—and probably shouldn't have, for his own safety—and here her dad went, acting as if it didn't matter. She shook her head and grumbled a curse under her breath. Hopefully, Chuck hadn't had time to catch a taxi yet. He should be out at the front by the ambulance bay—there.

Her tires squealed as she braked to a sudden stop that rattled her teeth. Sarah leaned down so he could see it was her, as if he wouldn't recognize her Jeep. "Chuck, get in."

"Go away, Sarah," he said.

"Chuck, I didn't know," she said. "I'm sorry, come on." If the real world had any sense of drama, this should be happening at night, in a thunderstorm, not a little before noon, under bright sunlight, with just a hint of a breeze off the nearby canal to cool things down a little.

"Just— I don't want to talk right now," Chuck said.

"Chuck, if we're going to beat them to the coordinates, we've got to go _now_."

Chuck blinked and ducked down to stare at her face. "You're serious. You want to race whoever your dad's bookie works for— probably the mob— you want to race the mob to whatever is at those coordinates?"

She grinned. "Something you should know about me, Chuck. I don't like to lose. Now get in the car."

Chuck shook his head. "I can't believe I'm doing this," he said. And got in the car.

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

><p>AN: So, now we're getting into what I call 'the meat' of the story. What that means will become apparent as the next couple chapters come out. Reviews are always appreciated.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8:

"It's not his bookie," Sarah said without thinking about it, as she turned into traffic. "My dad doesn't gamble."

"Then what?" Chuck said. "What's going on?"

She let out an enormous sigh. "Okay, Chuck. I never told anybody this before, but... my real name isn't Sarah Walker."  
>"What are you talking about? Oh my god, you're a spy aren't you?"<p>

"What? No! My dad's... he was a con man, and I kind of... worked with him. We moved around a lot; I had a different alias at every school. Sarah Walker is just the latest," Sarah risked looking away from the road to gauge Chuck's reaction so far. Not good, but not any worse than she'd imagined. "This is hard for me to tell, okay, it's just... fine, pull the bandaid. My dad stole about a quarter million dollars from the West Coast Armenian mob when I was a senior in high school. We had to go on the run, and we wound up here."

"Why are you telling me this?" Chuck said softly. "Not that I don't appreciate how big a deal it is that you're trusting me with this, I mean I've known you for like a day and a half."

"That's who really beat up my dad, not his bookie," she said. "I'm not trying to make excuses for him, but these people, they could have killed him. If he hadn't told them about the coordinates and convinced 'em they could make back their money and then some, we'd have been checking on him at the morgue, Chuck. If anything I'm impressed he convinced them to let him go. If they were smarter they'd have held onto him until they checked out the coordinates."

The conversation naturally lagged there. It was several minutes of Sarah darting the jeep through traffic before Chuck broke the silence. "Then..." he said, and stopped.  
>"What?"<p>

"Then, why are you so hell-bent on getting there first? Won't they go after just go after your dad again?"

Sarah shook her head. "He'll be out of the country an hour after the docs let him out of the hospital," she said. "With a new identity and half our emergency money. I'm not worried about him; not now anyway. If I'd known they had him last night, though..." she shivered involuntarily.

"What if they catch us?" Chuck said. "Or get there first, or while we're down looking for whatever is at these coordinates?"

Sarah blinked. "Didn't I mention?" she said. "He gave them the plane crash, not the coordinates Bryce sent you. We should be fine."

"Your dad is some kind of criminal mastermind, is that what you're telling me?"

"He likes to think so," Sarah said, slowing down as they approached the marina.

"Okay," he said. "So, what's your real name?"

"It's not important," she said. "I haven't been that person in twenty years, Chuck. Just call me Sarah."

Sarah led the way to _Lisa's Revenge, _with Chuck lugging the scuba gear from the car at her insistence. When she started untying the mooring lines, Chuck frowned. "Don't we need to fill up? Your dad said something last night..."

"What?" Sarah said, looking up from her ropes. "No, we have plenty. I don't remember him saying anything."

"He said you were down under half a tank, and we didn't want to get stranded out there," Chuck said. He followed her on deck toward the wheelhouse. "Which is... when I gave him the coordinates..."

Sarah laughed. "I must have missed that little conversation. God, he never turns it off. Half a tank is still like better than twelve hours with the engines going full speed. That's probably... 250 nautical miles?" She pointed to the fuel gauge. "And see: we're still at better than three-quarters."

"So he just wanted to get his hands on those coordinates? He was going to double cross me from the start?"

She shrugged, fiddling with dials and such on the dashboard. Sarah pushed a button and the engines caught after a moment; the whole boat started rumbling as the engines spooled up. "I don't know. Maybe. He probably just wanted to have the option."

"Your family is weird."

"My family is weird? Your sister accused me of being a hooker!"

Chuck stared at her. "When did you talk to Ellie?" He looked vaguely stricken.

"When you were in the shower," Sarah said. "We talked about a lot of things."

"Oh, dear lord," Chuck said.

"Relax," Sarah said. "I'm kidding. We only talked for a few minutes. You weren't in there long enough for her to get to anything really juicy. That and I think she was busy trying to decide whether I was a _hooker_ or not; because you didn't seem to react properly to _that_ the first time."

The color drained from his face. "Why would she think that?"

"Well," Sarah said. "Most sisters probably aren't too keen on their brothers dating the kind of girl who sleeps over on the first date."  
>"But you <em>didn't<em> sleep over," Chuck protested.

"Oh, but does Ellie know that?" Sarah grinned, letting him twist in the wind just a moment longer, before answering that question. "Yes, she knows I didn't sleep over. I told her as much of the truth as I thought prudent. You know, leaving out all the dead bodies and intrigue and such?"

"Thanks," Chuck said. "She's a little bit of a worrier."

"I didn't notice," Sarah goosed the engine a little and they were on their way.

Once they were safely out on the open ocean, Sarah and Chuck went down belowdeck so she could demonstrate how to refill the scuba tanks. "I don't know exactly what we'll find when we get out there, so it's probably best if we've got all our tanks full, especially if you need to go down there with me."

"Even though It'll be my first dive?"

"Hopefully it won't come to that," she said, "but we don't have a very big margin of error here, okay?"

"Sure, I get it," Chuck said, and pointed to the controls. "And I get it."

"Good," she said. "Get to work, then."

He tossed her a mocking salute. "Aye aye, Cap'n Walker."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "If you have any trouble working the compressor, you know where to find me."

Chuck waved her off and tried to let his mind drift, only paying attention to the dials of the pressure gauges and the hum of the compressor motor. There were half a dozen air canisters like the pair Sarah had brought to the hotel for his abbreviated scuba lesson, but three of them were depleted to some extent or another. It took nearly half an hour to get everything topped off, and then there was the matter of manhandling the tanks into some semblance or order.

Finally he had all eight tanks full of compressed air secured with straps to the wall, and his stomach was growling, so he headed up to the wheelhouse.

"So, any chance of lunch?" Chuck asked.

Sarah glanced quizzically at him. "I don't know; did you check the fridge in the galley? There should be some cold cuts or something. I know we've got a couple cases of energy bars in one of the cupboards. You weren't expecting me to drop everything to make you a sammich, were you?"

Chuck rolled his eyes. "I didn't want to just raid the fridge without asking. I'm a guest here, after all."

"Raid away," Sarah said, making a slight course adjustment and consulting her charts. She didn't really pay attention to Chuck's departing comment.

Her eyes darted back to the sea ahead of them, and then down to the charts once more, and she chewed her lip. It was at least another four hours to the coordinates they needed to check, and at the very earliest, if they recovered whatever lay on the bottom quickly and without incident, they would be coming back in darkness.

Maybe that was why she was on edge; there was no use denying it, she felt as she had that day the FBI had nearly caught up to her father ten years ago at their home in the San Diego suburbs. She couldn't shake the feeling, and it didn't make any sense. She knew they were a step ahead of the bad guys, and her father was safe in his hospital room. Sarah couldn't come up with a viable scenario where the local mob got there ahead of them, or at all. But she still couldn't quite convince herself of it.

Her lip curled into a grimace and she tapped the course heading into the navigation system. It wasn't quite an autopilot, but a glance ahead on their present course told her the boat wasn't going to collide with anything in a couple minutes.

Sarah grabbed the binoculars from the peg on the back wall of the wheelhouse and strode to the rail. She put them to her eyes and scanned the horizon. It wasn't completely deserted out; they were near a major shipping lane after all, but none of the cargo vessels she saw were likely to harbor mob goons.

Sarah went further aft and shifted her scan to their stern quarter. Again, nothing suspicious, so she finished the scan and let the binoculars fall to hang on their strap around her neck. She shook her head, more angry at herself than anything. "Getting jumpy, Walker," she said to herself.

"What's that?"

"Gahaah!" Sarah said, spinning around into a defensive posture.

Chuck jumped back in shock and nearly dropped the platter of sandwiches he was carrying. He managed not to lose the sandwiches over the side with a kind of sideways shuffle. "Sorry," he said. "Didn't mean to sneak up on you."

Sarah let out a sigh that was nearly a laugh. "I was just telling myself off for being jumpy," she said, grinning ruefully.

"Jumpy requires binoculars?"

Sarah shrugged. "I don't know," she said. "I... I'm probably being paranoid. Dad said he gave them the wrong coordinates, and I believe him, it's just... never mind."

Chuck plucked one of the triangle-cut halves of sandwich and held it out to her. "Balogna," he said, and nodded when Sarah took the sandwich. "Also, baloney. We're both on edge, and with good reason. I punched a mobster last night!"

Sarah managed a grin, and shook her head in mild exasperation. "Come on, we'd better get back to the wheelhouse so we don't ram a freighter or something."

Chuck's eyes widened. "Does that happen often?"

"No, not really," she explained. "And if it looked like we were going to cross paths with one of the big ships, they've got lookouts. Their warning horns are pretty hard to miss."

They climbed back up the two stairs into the wheelhouse and Sarah sat on the table as she ate her finger-sandwich, one long leg stretched out to steer the over-sized wheel with her toes.

Chuck looked on incredulously, the sandwich in his hand forgotten. She munched happily and glanced at him questioningly.

"That can't be safe," he protested.

"Which one of us does this for a living, Bartowski?"

They made better time than Sarah expected; maybe the current was with them, but that only meant the return trip would take longer, so it all balanced out. It was still better than half past three when the GPS announced that they had arrived at their destination. Sarah pulled back on the throttle, but after a moment's hesitation left the engines idling. Fuel wasn't a concern, despite her father's story to Chuck the previous day, and she still had the shadow of fear in the back of her head, nagging at her. If they needed to make a quick exit, she didn't want to have to waste time starting the heavy-duty engines back up.

She glanced at the charts and grunted. "What's up?" Chuck asked.

"It's just odd. We're out in the middle of the channel, but the depth on the charts is only fifty feet or so," Sarah shrugged it off. "Probably not important, but it means I don't have to worry so much about decompression. I'd have to be down for more than an hour at that depth before I'd get any serious complications. Hell, I could probably free dive down that far."

"How 'bout we don't borrow trouble, Sarah."

She rolled her eyes, and waved for him to follow.

Next order of business was dropping anchor, but again, Sarah didn't follow her usual routine, thanks to her lingering unease. Usually two anchors were required to make sure the boat stayed exactly where you wanted it for a dive. Once that was finished, she had Chuck go grab the diving gear while she changed into her wetsuit and strapped her diving knife on.

Back on deck, Chuck helped her into the heavy scuba tank.

He looked more nervous than she felt, which was saying something. Sarah finally said something as she was putting on her flippers. "Okay," she said. "Spit it out, Chuck."

"Be careful," he said.

"You know what a ...cautious sort I am."

"That's Raiders, not Star Wars."

Sarah stuck her tongue out at him and flipped backwards into the sea.

The sun was at a good angle, and she could see the bottom, despite the pollution, even without her handheld lamp. It was the same one she'd used the day before, except she hadn't bothered hooking up the camera this time. That left Chuck in the dark, but it was one more delay, and she wanted to be done here and heading back to port as soon as possible. Sarah spotted the sunken vessel right off. A thirty-footer or so, laying capsized on the bottom. As she swam nearer she began to make out details, and her blood went cold at the sight of her third gunshot body in two days. This man was balding and slightly overweight, and his body was half-exposed, head and shoulders and chest poking out from under the railing where it was crushed into the sediment of the bottom.

She swam closer still, playing her light around for other bodies, but found nothing. Sarah went right up to the side and shone her light through about a foot wide gap where the railing had held up the bulk of the craft just enough. Sarah grimaced and swam back up to Chuck on the _Lisa's Revenge._

"That was quick," Chuck called. "Find anything?"

"Another dead body. Gunshot same as the others," she said, pumping her legs to get around to the stern ladder and climb back aboard. "And a boat, but I couldn't find any safe way into the wreck to investigate. We're going to have to flip it."

Chuck blinked. "How do we do that?" He extended a hand and hauled her the last couple rungs up onto the deck.

Sarah nodded to the miniature crane assembly nearby. "I'll show you how to work the winch," she said. That took another ten minutes, and then she was diving again, this time with the trailing end of the cables in her right hand and her light in her left. She started to loop the cables around the bit of exposed railing and then stopped to reconsider. Might that just tear the railing off wholesale. Sarah swam a slow circle around the capsized boat and found a more likely spot. She had to dig in the bottom with her hands briefly until she found one of the cleats for the mooring lines, then she looped the cable around them securely. They didn't really need to flip the boat over completely, just on its side and stable would be enough for her. Still, she wasn't entirely satisfied with the setup and, trailed the secondary cable around to the anchor mounting and tied the second cable to the external mounting bracket there.

She went back up one more time to give Chuck the signal to start the winch and then stuck her head under the water to watch.

The cables went taut with an audible twang, only a moment or so before the boat started to shift. From her vantage point near the surface, she saw mostly a cloud of silt erupt from around the white fiberglass hull of the mystery boat. Sarah stuck her head up and spat out her pressure regulator. "Okay, that ought to do it," she shouted.

"Aye aye," Chuck shouted back, in what she realized was an entirely unironic fashion.

Sarah glanced at her air gauge and chewed her lip thoughtfully. She was down to three-quarters of her supply, from all the up and down, and it was probably safer to go get a fresh tank, since this trip would probably be longer, and involve a search of the sunken boat's interior. But there was still a voice in the back of her head nagging her for speed, so she raised her voice again. "I'm going back down," she called out, replaced the regulator and dove back down.

Sarah spotted two new bodies as she approached the wreck and part of her cringed inside. Five dead, and as she played the light over the bloated corpses, she saw the telltale gunshot wounds again. Five men, all murdered over this whatever-it-was. She didn't expect there to actually be an R7 laptop anymore.

Searching the boat didn't turn out to be a very strenuous task. Her lamp picked up a glint of silver through the haze of churned up silt, and Sarah swam in that direction. There was a large briefcase, nearly the size of a suitcase, of a dull grey metal. There was a pair of handcuffs attached to the handle of the case; that was the silvery flash she'd spotted.

Once she got her arms around the thing and started up, she spotted the other boat, just coming alongside the _Lisa's Revenge. _How the _hell _had she not heard them on the approach? Sarah cursed herself mentally. The sound of the diesel engines on her boat, even idling, had been audible for most of her dive, if just as background noise, and she'd allowed herself to tune them out.

She briefly considered options. With any luck it was the local coast guard. There were enough ships in this part of the ocean that the Philippine government had dedicated at least some resources to policing the seaways. That's what it must be, she thought, trying to convince herself; and she was still hopeful when her head breached the surface.

That's where her hopes died of course, when she spotted a familiar, but unwelcome face at the railing of her boat.

"Hey there, gorgeous," he called, pointing a pistol at her. "Got a present for me?"

Chuck was standing at the railing as well, yet another man standing behind him, with the muzzle of an AK 47 held to the back of Chuck's head.

Sarah spat out her regulator and grimaced. "Garret. What brings you here?"

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

><p>AN: Next chapter is kind of kicking my butt. I wanted to be halfway finished with it before I posted this, but it's been more than a week and I'm still working on the opening scene. I'm trying to stick to my guns as far as a chapter a week goes. We'll see how that goes. Reviews usually help me out of a slump. Hint. :)


	9. Chapter 9

A/N: Took longer than I wanted to get this chapter done. Hopefully everybody remembers where we were? Sarah has just recovered a mysterious case from a wreck on the bottom of the ocean only to find Chuck being held at gunpoint by a mob boss she dated briefly several months ago. And... action!

* * *

><p>Chapter 9:<p>

"Don't play coy, girlie. I want whatever you found down there," he shouted down to her, "Or your new boyfriend here gets it."

"'Get's it?' Seriously?" Chuck said, "What's next, 'you dirty rat?' You need to improve your witty banter if you want to play in the big leagues tough-guy, that was just atrocious."

Garret nodded to the man behind Chuck, and Sarah cringed. He clocked Chuck in the kidney with the butt of his rifle. It could have been much worse, but even that was enough to make him cry out and collapse out of sight. Then the man aimed his rifle down at Chuck.

"Don't!" Sarah said, and lifted the metal case up out of the water enough for them to see it. "I found the case. Just take it and let us go."

"I'll take it under advisement," Garret said, nodding to another one of his cronies. "Get the case."

Sarah swam over to the ladder, two more men with assault rifles appearing at the rail to 'help' her onto the boat. As she came up the aft ladder, she spotted two more gunmen still on the second boat. One of the men stood a couple steps off with the gun pointed at her head while the second one took the case from her. After a second's thought, he bent and snatched her diving knife out of its scabbard on her calf. Sarah shrugged out of her scuba tanks, and one of the gunmen grabbed her arm impatiently before he frogmarched her over to where Chuck sat. She was sat down hard and glared up at the men who had stormed her boat.

"You alright?" Chuck asked softly, and Sarah turned the glare on him.

"I'm fine," she said. "Stop antagonizing the pirates."

"Yeah, I kind of figured that out myself. Wait, I thought he was a mobster," Chuck whispered.

Sarah waved expansively. "This right here is an act of piracy. Makes them pirates now. They have a boat and everything."

"No talking!" one of the pirates shouted. Chuck pretended to lock his mouth shut and throw away the key. Sarah rolled her eyes.

Garret and his men crowded around the case and talked amongst themselves, though one of them kept a constant eye on Chuck and Sarah. Like they were going to do anything except sit quietly and pray they didn't get shot and dumped over the side. Sarah ground her teeth. She counted six, not including Garret. A glanced down at her hands surprised her. They should have been shaking, but they were steady. It really didn't make any sense.

She finally caught some of the conversation. "I don't care, just shoot the lock open!" Garret grumbled.

"Ohshit," she heard Chuck breathe, a moment before he tackled her.

"Ow! What the hell!" Sarah said. Chuck shook his head and put his hand roughly in her hair, turning her face into the side of his neck. There was a blast of gunfire, loud enough to startle her, followed by a scream of pain. A burst of splinters showered over them an instant after something zipped by her head. Chuck slid off of her and grimaced.

One of Garret's cronies was down, clutching at a bloody leg. Her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest. That had been a bullet buzzing by her head a moment ago. "Are you hurt?" Sarah whispered when she could force words out. Chuck shook his head.

"No, I'm alright."

She nodded and took a shaky breath. "But, you knew there'd be a ricochet?"

"My sentiments exactly," Garret loomed over them, gun pointed at Chuck's head. "Open the case."

"I can't... I mean, don't shoot!" Chuck said. "It's... I recognize the model. It's an R600 series quad-lock. Triple biometrics and a passcode. A friend of mine was on the design team. Bulletproofing is standard. So's the anti-tamper charge. If you shoot it again, you'll fry whatever's in there."

"Triple biometric?" Garret said. "What's that mean?"

"It requires a fingerprint, retinal scan, and voice-print match, in combination with the correct code to open," Chuck said. "And if you bust it open, there's an incendiary charge built in to destroy the contents."

"So you can't open it," Garret said. "Makes you expendable."

"Wait, wait!" Chuck said, holding up his hands over his face. "I didn't say that. I might be able to open it safely. But I'd need tools. An oxy-acetylene torch, a couple other things. I can probably do it, just don't kill us."

Sarah wanted to glare at Chuck for buckling so quickly under the pressure, but she couldn't find it in herself to be angry at him. It was too outside either of their experience. In all the years she'd worked with her father, running cons on sometimes very dangerous people, she'd never been this scared. Or at such a disadvantage. There were weapons on board, if she could get to them. It wasn't hopeless, but her thoughts kept racing in that same futile circle and running into a brick wall. To get her hands on a gun she'd have to be out of sight of all the gunmen, and Garret was smart enough that he wouldn't allow that. She shook her head.

One of Garret's men shook his head. "No way, man. Keeping them alive long enough to find the stuff he needs is too much of a risk."

Sarah bit the inside of her cheek. Damn it. "We have one belowdecks, in the engine room," she said with a grimace.

"Show me," Garret said, reaching down and hauling Sarah to her feet with a hand on her arm. He shoved her toward the ladder heading belowdecks and then paused. "Don't get any ideas there, blondie," the next bit went to the man still hovering over Chuck with the assault rifle. "You hear a gunshot, kill him." He turned the grin on Chuck. "If _he_ tries anything, shoot him. _I _hear a gunshot I kill _her. _Wasn't born yesterday kids."

"Well that's obvious," Chuck said. "Yesterday, Sarah was kicking you in the balls. And she doesn't strike me as the child abusing kind." Despite everything, Sarah had to fight down a snort of laughter. Of course then, the gunman guarding Chuck cracked him in the face with the butt of his rifle. "Ow," Chuck grumbled and clutched at his face.

Sarah tensed as she went down the ladder. This was the only chance she was going to get, out of sight of most of the gunmen, but she hadn't counted on Garret being smart as well as vindictive. She got to the bottom and started turning aft for the engine room. Garret stopped her, waving the gun. "Uh-uh. We got plenty of time, I want the grand tour."

"What are you talking about?"

Garret shoved her and Sarah staggered a step or two back down the corridor. She caught her balance with a hand to the door-frame of her cabin, and felt a pit of ice forming in her stomach. She could already see where this was heading before Garret opening his stupid mouth again. "Get on the bed."

"You're disgusting," Sarah spat, rounding on him in a fighting stance. The barrel of the pistol in his hand loomed ominously.

"You remember what I told my men. Be nice, or your boyfriend up there is a dead man. You treat me nice maybe I'll even let him live."

Sarah backed away from the gun; there was little else she could do. "You stay away from me."

"Come on, babe. You didn't always think I was so repulsive," Garret said. "We had some good times, didn't we?"

"God, you're delusional," Sarah said. "Do you not _remember_ me storming out in the middle of dinner? I don't date criminals."

"Oh, don't want people to think you've got a daddy complex," Garret grinned. "I see how it is. Sit down."

Sarah sat on her bed, gritting her teeth and looking around in desperation. There had to be a way out of this. Her eyes fell on a strap protruding from underneath her bed and the air seemed to freeze in her lungs. She schooled her features back to the miserable expression she'd worn a moment ago. "Just... don't hurt Chuck, okay?"

Garret shot her a grin and put his gun on Sarah's dresser while he started pulling his shirt off over his head.

Sarah looped her through the strap and she yanked her speargun out from under her cot, spinning it into her hands. She set the buttstock into her hip and hauled back on the heavy rubber band, cocking the weapon. The leather quiver strapped along the bottom of the speargun held five eighteen inch steel projectiles, and Sarah flipped one out and was fitting it into the nock, when Garret's head popped out of his shirt. His eyes widened comically and he began to turn, reaching for his pistol. His hands were still trapped in his shirt and he just managed to knock the weapon down onto the floor before Sarah opened fire.

The speargun made a dull low pitched twang sound and the projectile took him in the center of the chest, just below the sternum.

Garret stumbled a step after his fallen handgun and then pitched to the ground with a thump. He landed on his side and rolled onto his back limply, mouth open to shout. But all that came out was a liquid gurgle and a stream of blood.

Sarah swallowed heavily and slung the speargun on her back as she skirted around the spreading pool of blood to scoop up the dying man's fallen handgun. "How's that for a daddy complex, asshole," she said, but it was almost entirely bravado. She checked the weapon, making sure the safety was on and her stomach lurched. Sarah barely made it into the head before she started puking her guts out.

Once she was in control of her stomach again, she looked at herself in the mirror. "You just killed a man," she told her reflection. And if she was going to live through the next five minutes... "One down, six to go." Sarah shook her head. How the hell was she going to pull this off? They had assault rifles and she had... a speargun and Garret's pistol. Time to change that. The plan was fairly simple when it came down to it.

Her father kept a 12 gauge in the closet of his cabin, and she wasted nearly a minute before she found the box of shells in his sock drawer. Sarah fed rounds into the bottom of the shotgun as she headed back down the corridor to her cabin. She took her backup diving knife and strapped it on, followed by a fanny-pack to hold the left-over shotgun shells from the box of fifteen. It was a struggle not to look at the body.

She grabbed her emergency backpack just in case and slipped the shoulder straps on. After that, she crept forward to the ladder.

Sarah padded up the ladder and peered out on deck. She spotted Chuck, still sitting in the same spot as when she and Garret had gone below a couple minutes earlier. The man who'd taken the ricochet was gone, but she couldn't risk getting spotted and popped back under cover. They'd probably moved him back into the other boat to give him first aid. She paused, trying to get her breathing under control. She needed... rooting in her emergency backpack turned up a small mirror, perfect.

Sarah eased the mirror around the edge of the door-frame and scanned the front deck of the boat. Chuck, and two gunmen. It took an awkward pose but she managed to catch a glimpse of the other boat. Three men standing, plus the wounded man. Arguing about something it looked like. The two at the front of the boat turned, one going over to the railing.

"Alright," Sarah said under her breath. "Now or never." She slipped aft in a crouch, keeping the bulk of the wheelhouse between her and the gunmen as much as she could. Her heart was hammering in her chest. She used the small mirror to check around the corner before darting to the crane. The winch was still attached to the boat on the bottom, and the anchor was still out. Sarah growled and hit the emergency release on the winch, before crawling on her elbows over to the anchor chain and popping the pin out of flange that held the whole anchor chain in place.

"Shit, shit!" Sarah hissed, realizing her mistake a moment too late. The chain rattled and flipped out into the water with a splash and she dove back behind the crane. She fumbled her mirror back out and used it to peer around the corner of the wheelhouse. One of the gunmen was approaching. If he came much closer he'd see her and that was it. Without the element of surprise, they were as good as dead. Sarah slung the shotgun off her back and flicked the safety off, tensing herself for the recoil as she fit the stock to her shoulder. She held the mirror in her off hand, awkwardly steadying the muzzle at the same time.

"It's nothing!" The gunman shouted and turned back toward the foredeck. Sarah let out a sigh of relief as she watched his retreating back. It was a struggle getting her legs to obey her command, but after a few seconds she padded forward behind the man and slipped into the wheelhouse, still crouched over. She peeked over the console, checking positioning. The others were still on the other boat, and the two gunmen still on the boat were both at the front, the closer one covering Chuck with his AK. The bulk of the wheelhouse itself would screen her from view by the second gunman. She'd only get one shot at this.

The one covering Chuck had the muzzle of his rifle pointed vaguely in Chuck's direction. If she went for the shot and the man squeezed the trigger in his death throes he'd spray Chuck with bullets. Sarah wanted to avoid that. She leaned out and waved surreptitiously. Chuck's eyes widened when he spotted her and she put a finger to her lips. Chuck nodded minutely. Sarah mouthed the words 'distract him' as slowly and carefully as she could. He shrugged in confusion. Sarah glared at the sky, cursing inwardly and brandished the shotgun, pointing to the back of the gunman, and then to Chuck, before miming being shot.

He got it after a moment's thought.  
>"Hey, buddy," Chuck said. "I've gotta use the little boys room."<p>

"Shut up."

"But I've got to _go_oooo!" Chuck sing-songed. The gunman raised his weapon to clock Chuck in the face again, taking his weapon out of line.

Sarah cradled the shotgun and took the shot from ten feet away. The gunman crumpled with a basketball sized pattern of pellets in his back, his assault rifle clattering to the deck. She turned and racked the pump to chamber another 12-gauge buckshot round as she came around the corner of the wheelhouse and fell to a knee. The second gunman was turning in shock and squeezed off a quick burst of automatic fire in the moment before Sarah's second shot took him in the face and chest. The man's fire whipped over Sarah's head.

"Chuck! Wheelhouse! Now!" Sarah shouted, backing up and using the wheelhouse for cover, pumping and firing as fast as she could. The men in the other boat ducked below the railing, and moments later Chuck staggered into her.

Sarah grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him into the wheelhouse after her, "Stay down," she shouted, spinning the wheel and ramming the throttle all the way forward to the redline. The engines roared and the boat lurched forward. Sarah breathed a sigh of relief that Garret and his goons hadn't thought to turn the engines off.

Over the roar of the engines, Sarah heard a splash. Chuck started to rise so he could peek out the side window, and Sarah grabbed him by the shirt again. He flinched down an instant before the windows shattered to the sound of gunfire from the other boat. The bullets came from the side at first and then from the rear.

"Holy crap!" Chuck said. "How aren't we dead?"

Sarah bonged her knuckles on the wall. "We salvaged an old World War II destroyer a few months ago and we... borrowed some of the armor to redo the walls."

"Your boat is bulletproof?"

"No, just the wheelhouse," Sarah explained. "You have any idea how much two inch steel plate weighs?"

Chuck laughed hysterically from his back. "God, I can't believe we got away. But the bad guys took the case onto their boat."

"Yeah, hate to break it to you Chuck," Sarah said. "But we haven't gotten away yet."

"Exqueeze me?"

"Their boat's faster than ours," she said, "I recognize the hull. I rammed them, and I think that splash was one of them going overboard, but that's only going to buy us a thirty second head start or so. If you want to do the math you're welcome to it. Their boat's got at least a couple knots on us. They'll catch up long before we're in sight of land."

"Oh. Crap," Chuck said. "I... oh Christ you killed two people."

"Three," Sarah corrected. "Garret threatened to have you shot if I didn't have sex with him."

"Oh my god, Sarah, are you okay?"

"Yeah. I had my speargun."

"Thank god," Chuck said. "Shit!" He handled the AK with a familiarity that surprised her, spinning the weapon up into a firing position and coming to his feet in a rush. She hadn't even noticed that he'd grabbed the weapon from the downed gunman until now.

"Chuck what are you doing, stay down!" Sarah shouted just as Chuck opened up on fully automatic. It was little more than two seconds before the action locked back on an empty chamber and Chuck sank back to his earlier spot on the wheelhouse floor. Sarah pulled her hands off her ears. "Are you crazy?"

Chuck shook his head wearily. "The guy who fell overboard. He must have managed to grab that ladder on the back of the boat." Sarah blinked and started to look aft herself, but Chuck grabbed her arm. "Don't. It's a mess back there. I think I'm going to be sick. Tell me you've got a plan."

Sarah tried to catch her breath. She shook her head. "Not really. I think there's what, three left on the other boat?"

"Yeah. We... god, we killed four people."

"It was them or us, Chuck."

"I know that," Chuck said. "I just. I've only ever punched two people in my life, and now I've killed a man."

Sarah fought down the bile trying to rise in the back of her throat again. "I know. But we can't think about that right now. We've killed their friends. So, they're definitely not going to let us escape."

"You want to risk another firefight? We barely survived that one."

"I _know,_ okay. I don't think I've got another gunfight in me today anyway," Sarah said.

"You have another plan?" Chuck said. "Please say yes?"

"No," Sarah said. "Damnit, no I do—" she blinked and stopped mid-word. "No, that's crazy. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I highly doubt it," Chuck said. "My current plan involves a meteor hitting their boat through the power of positive thinking. If you've got an idea, its gotta be better than anything I got."

"We sink the boat."

"What?" Chuck said. "You've got a plan to sink their boat? Really, that's awesome!"

"No," Sarah shook her head. "Not their boat. Ours."

"But, we're... _on..._ our boat."

"Exactly," she grinned.

"Oh, man, you're not even joking a little bit, are you?"

"We've got seven full air tanks down belowdecks; that's at_ least_ three hours of air supply for each of us. We sink the boat, and then sit on the bottom and wait for them to leave." Sarah snapped her fingers. "This could work! Just make sure the zodiac is tied down securely, then we cut it loose and it'll float back up; we can use the outboard motor on that to get back to land."

Chuck shook his head. "And this all just... came to you...?"

Sarah shrugged. "Yeah?"

"Okay," Chuck said in resignation. "How do we actually go about sinking the boat in this cockamamie plan of yours?"

"Cockamamie?" Sarah huffed. "I've got some C4 stashed in the secret compartment in the fore wall of the galley."

"Of course you do," Chuck breathed, "Okay, I'm in."

TO BE CONTINUED...

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><p>AN: I got a review a couple chapters ago which made mention of 'Chekhov's speargun' and it made me laugh because it was true.

Chekhov was probably the best short story writer of all time. Basically, Chekhov's gun: If a gun shows up in a story, it better get fired at some point, or why bother mentioning the gun in the first place?

I actually almost took the part out where Sarah put the speargun under her bed, because I thought it might be giving the game away.

Drop me a review if you want. I don't care. (This is me attempting to appear nonchalant. Please actually review if you liked this chapter. Or if you didn't. I only get better if people tell me when I did things wrong.)


	10. Chapter 10

A/N: I think I mentioned how much of a pain this chapter was being in a previous author's note. It bears repeating. This chapter was a pain to write. Not so much in the actual writing of the chapter. Because once it got going. Man, it got going. I'm talking about writer's block. :(

* * *

><p>Chapter 10:<p>

It wasn't that easy, of course. It never is. They had to crawl around to the ladder heading below-decks so that the gunmen in the pursuing boat wouldn't see them. The railing was solid in most places, so it screened them from sight, but if they were spotted it wouldn't protect them from gunfire. Especially not the high-powered rifle rounds their pursuers seemed to favor. As they crawled around back of the wheelhouse to the hatch, Sarah caught a glimpse of the man Chuck had mowed down and she blanched visibly. Chuck had to swallow hard to keep from losing his lunch.

"Hey," he whispered. "Grab his ammo; I'll go check the one you shot."

"You going to need that many bullets, 'Tex?'"

"Better safe than sorry," Chuck shrugged.

Sarah nodded at the logic of the moment and crawled close enough to snag the man's weapon by its shoulder strap. She was getting quite the collection of weaponry; spear-gun, pistol, shotgun, and now assault rifle. Sarah shook her head. Practically a one woman arsenal. Chuck joined back up with her and they went toward the ladder.

Once out of their pursuers line of sight, Chuck stood, holding his back. Sarah held the second AK out to him. "Here," she said. "I didn't know how to work the magazine release, and I didn't want to risk accidentally shooting something."

"Oh, you don't want to hold onto it?"

Sarah rolled her eyes and waved at herself. "I've got plenty. Besides, we don't have time for weapons familiarization."

Chuck took the second AK and removed the magazine, before pausing for a moment and racking back the charging handle to check the chamber. There was one more round in there, which Chuck palmed before squeezing it into the spare box magazine with his thumb. "You have another backpack I can use?"

Sarah nodded and led the way to her father's cabin, finding a heavy rucksack and tossing it over to him.

"You mind if I ask where you learned to handle automatic weapons? Just seems a little odd, for a computer programmer." There was a touch of suspicion in her tone.

Chuck merely shrugged. "Summer camp," he grinned when she glared at him on the way back toward the galley.

"No seriously," Sarah pressed. She kicked open a cabinet and came out with a pair of pry-bars.

Chuck grabbed one of the pry-bars and shrugged again before setting to work on the wall where Sarah pointed. "Sophomore year of college," he explained. "Bryce and his dad took like half the frat to this private security firm boot camp thing. Like I said. Summer camp," Sarah grinned at him. "What?"

"You were in a frat?"

"Yes," Chuck sighed. "It's not all bear pong and naughty coeds, believe me."

They pried open the wood paneling in the farthest forward wall of the galley, and Sarah climbed into a tiny triangular room, more a cubbyhole really. "Okay," she said, pushing a detonator into one of the blocks of explosive and handing it over. She paused to twist the ends of a wire onto the end of the blasting cap. "Take this up on deck and put it on the side of the winch."

"What?" Chuck stared down at the brick of C4 in his hand and the accompanying spool of wire.

"I'm gonna be busy making the shaped charges to do the actual scuttling. We need a big flashy explosion so they think the engines blew and we didn't do it ourselves."

"Because that's going to be their first guess?" Chuck said. "Really?"

"You want to risk it? And have to choose between suffocating and surfacing into their gun-sights? How about we cover all our bases instead?"

"Point taken. And you know how to make shaped charges?"  
>"Theoretically," Sarah said. "When you're done, start bringing the tanks in here from the engine room. We're going to want to be as far away from the blast as we can get, just in case."<p>

"Yeah, I can see that. How long do you think we've got before they catch up?"

"You're the math-lete, remember, not me," Sarah shrugged. "I'm guessing... ten minutes?"

"I guess I'd better hurry."

"Don't forget to tie down the Zodiac!" she called after him. Chuck waved acknowledgment and made his way up the ladder.

Sarah had one of the bricks of C4 in her hands when Chuck got back from crawling around on deck to the crane and doing his part. He held the end of the wire in one hand and watched dubiously as she began to work the explosive block between her hands, rolling it out into a long snake between her palms like it was play-dough. "I hope you know what you're doing," Chuck shouted over the roaring diesel engines.

Sarah's grin was a touch manic. "You and me both, Chuck."

Chuck started dragging the air-tanks forward to the galley, taking one per trip so he wouldn't risk dropping one of them. On his third trip Sarah was fiddling with foot-long sections of steel bar with an L-shaped cross-section. He frowned at the progress. "You do know what you're doing, right?"

Sarah waved him off. "Yes. God, you worry like my grandmother."

"When there's plastique involved. I figure I'm entitled."

She stuck out her tongue at him and started duct-taping sections of C4-packed bars to the floor in between the twin diesels. "Back to work," Chuck rolled his eyes and finished toting the air tanks up to the little cubbyhole in the fore wall of the galley. On his way back, he met Sarah in the corridor coming the other way, trailing the spools of wire to both the shaped charges in the engine room and the pound of C4 on deck. She quirked an eyebrow at him when he kept on past her.

Chuck turned to walk backwards for a moment. "I had an idea," he explained, before ducking into her father's cabin for a moment.

When he dragged the mattress off her father's bunk into the galley, she nodded. "Nice thinking," she said, helping him make a kind of shield with the padding. Hopefully it would cushion them a little bit. They were strapping the air tanks down securely when Chuck's watch beeped.  
>"What's that?"<p>

"Five minutes," he explained. "You figured ten, but I halved it to be on the safe side."

"That's probably," she said, but cut off. "Oh, shit." Sarah pointed out the small porthole.

The pirates were back, pulling alongside already. Chuck couldn't make out any faces, but he recognized the boat easily enough.

"Crap, crap, crap!" Chuck said as he clambered hastily over the mattress doing double duty as makeshift blast shield. If the shaped charges worked as advertised, they wouldn't need it, but 'better safe than sorry' was kind of becoming his unofficial motto recently.

Sarah wriggled into the compartment next to him. He could just catch the sound of raised voices through the hum of the engines and the slap of waves against the hull, but he couldn't make out any of the words.

She grimaced and held up the two wires in one hand and a nine-volt battery in the other, grinned crookedly and gave him a peck on the cheek. "For luck," she said as she tapped the wire to the battery terminals.

The explosion wasn't what Chuck had expected. His experience with explosives was limited at best; his memories of the flash-bangs back at that summer camp seven years earlier had him tensed for bright lights and stupendous crash of thunder. But it sounded more like a shotgun blast, not easy on the ears by any means, but still not quite what he had expected. The boat lurched and shuddered from the pound of C4 on the rear deck, but that was all. He barely felt the concussion of it at all. Hopefully it had been more impressive to the men on the other boat.

"Kind of a let-down," Chuck said.

"Well, I wasn't really trying."

"What?" Chuck said with a frown of confusion.

"The kiss."

"I meant the explosion!"

"Oh, right," Sarah levered herself back to her feet. "Come on!"

"Um, I think we should stay put."

"You left the pressure regulators in the engine room."

"Why is nothing ever easy," Chuck asked the sky.

_Lisa's Revenge_ was already starting to tilt down at the stern from water rushing into the engine compartment, and he hardly relished the idea, but it would be a little complicated trying to breathe out of the air tanks without mouthpieces. They might be able to do it if it came to that.

Hopefully it wouldn't.

They charged aft and were up to their ankles in water before they even left the galley. It was knee deep in the corridor and approaching thigh-deep in the engine room. A huge bloom of water was still rising up between the engines as they waded in.

"Where the hell are they!" Sarah shouted. "I thought they were right here!"

The water was rising, up from mid-thigh to their hips already.

Chuck dunked himself under the water and blinked against the salt. He shot a hand back up through the water, pointing for Sarah. "They fell off the hook. Over there in the corner." The flow of water and gravity had nudged the fallen dive-equipment into the far rear corner of the engine room.

The diesels were struggling, chugging along but stuttering every few seconds. They wouldn't last much longer, in all likelihood. In addition to the water, a pall of smoke was filling the room.

Sarah dove in the direction of the regulators and masks, but the up-draft of water from the hole blasted in the hull knocked her back. She came out of the water sputtering, her hair plastered to her head. "Go back into the galley," she shouted over the rush of water. She un-slung the spear-gun from her shoulder.

"What are you doing!" Chuck demanded.

"There's a bunch of dead pirates on board," Sarah said in the middle of hauling back the rubber. "That much blood will draw sharks."

"And you're just thinking of this now!"

"Hey! I didn't hear you suggesting anything better!" Sarah fitted a spear into the notch and coughed from the smoke. "I can't get to the regulators until the water pressure in here equalizes."

"Can you hold your breath that long?"

"I don't know! But I doubt you can. Get back into the galley. Maybe you'll get lucky and an air bubble will form up in the bow."  
>"Don't you have some little emergency air tanks somewhere?"<p>

"They were with the masks on the hook," Sarah shot back. "They must have got washed over where we can't get them with the rest of the stuff."

"Well, crap," Chuck said before a coughing fit racked him. The water was up to his chest now.

"I'm going to try for the gear again," Sarah said. "Get as far forward as you can!" She was shorter than him, and the water level was up past her shoulders. It wasn't so much a dive this time as just letting herself drop below the surface. It sent a shiver down Chuck's spine to see.

He grimaced and turned to the door, hating himself for deserting her. But he wasn't, really, was he? It was her ship. It was her plan.

The corridor was tilting crazily as he made his way forward, and now upward. The ship was listing somewhat to the side, and he half-waded, half-climbed his way back toward the galley. His adrenaline was pumping, and everything was clear in his mind, even with the smoke trailing up the corridor above his head from the engine room and water gurgling up around him. He saw the galley door. It was one of those pressure doors like you saw on submarines and warships. Bulkhead door, was that right? His thoughts coalesced and he tried to shoulder the door closed. Water was still rushing in and he couldn't get the thing closed. Even up at the highest of the interior spaces the water was up to his thighs now. Besides, he'd need to wait for Sarah before he could seal the thing against sharks. Stupid! You should have remembered that earlier.

The refrigerator. He could probably wrestle it over to put against the door, if they couldn't get the door sealed. That might keep out a shark, and the dead men would all be on the other side. Smoke made him cough again. Maybe they wouldn't be able to sense him and Sarah. Didn't sharks have some kind of sixth sense though? He thought he remembered that from a school report. Magnetic something, because they had iron deposits in their heads somewhere? That couldn't be right. He was thinking of carrier pigeons. No. The refrigerator was bolted down like everything else in the galley. Bolt cutters. Back to the engine room. He wrestled the door all the way back open and started back for the bolt cutters, and stopped.

Looking back down the corridor, it stopped only a few feet back, water filling the entire thing, cutting off the corridor at a bizarre-feeling diagonal as the boat continued to pitch down at the stern. The water was up past his hips even in the galley, and the smoke was thinning out. The engines were completely underwater now, some part of his brain chimed in.

Where the hell was—

Sarah's head burst through the surface and she thrust a mask at him. She already had hers on, and one of the emergency air bottles sticking out of her mouth. She took it out long enough to ask. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Bolt cutters," he tried to explain, holding his shirt over his mouth against the smoke. Sarah shook her head so he went on. He pointed out the refrigerator needlessly. "To move the fridge in front of the door."

"No, just wait," she said. "Breathe from the emergency bottle for now." Sarah spoke in relatively short sentences, pausing to breathe from her emergency bottle to avoid smoke inhalation. "Once the pressure equalizes we can seal the door. Should keep out sharks. Then we hook up to the big tanks. Put the mask on. It helps with the smoke."

The water was up around his neck by the time Chuck got his mask on, with Sarah's help. Once they were completely underwater, it was a relatively painless process getting the door shut and turning the handle to seal them in.

The air from his tiny emergency bottle tasted stale, and a little metallic, almost coppery, like blood. That was probably his imagination. Sarah swam forward, which was closer to straight up now, but that was shifting too a little. The engines were heavy enough to keep them tipped toward mostly toward the stern, but the shape of the hull mitigated that some as well. Boats were designed somewhat like planes, with the forward edge designed to cut through water or air both; the shape itself gave the sinking ship a little forward momentum, keeping it from falling straight down at the stern. It was still about a forty-five degree backward tilt, Chuck judged. Getting around the mattress they'd wedged into the cubbyhole in the fore wall was a chore, but then they were packed in with the tanks again and hi head broke the surface of a little bubble of air.

Chuck pulled the air bottle away from his mouth and breathed in instinctively; a coughing fit took him. All the smoke had gathered in the tiny pressurized bubble. In the dark, hands gripped him and forced something into his mouth, and the metallic tasting air was suddenly the best thing ever.

There was light a moment later, and he managed to focus. A glow stick. Sarah was pulling a second one out of her pack and handing it to him.

He cracked the stick and shook it to mix the chemicals, then held onto the light like it was a lifeline.

Chuck dug in his pocket for his phone. The screen lit up and he tapped a quick message.

_**Thanks.**_

He turned the screen toward her.

Despite the mask and the air bottle obscuring her expression, Chuck could tell she was surprised. She took the phone from him.

_**Forgot this thing was waterproof.**_

The boat lurched suddenly and Sarah dropped the phone. It flipped slowly through the water and then sped away as the boat finished crunching into the bottom. The forty-five degree angle hurled them upward into the mattress. Or, strictly speaking, the tiny bit of remembered hydrodynamics from Stanford informed him, the boat had shifted downward and they had stayed in the same position. Without the mattress, they might have been seriously injured. It took Sarah a while to find the phone by the light of its screen and the pair of glow-sticks.

She typed briefly on the touch screen.

_**Really good thinking on the mattress.**_

Chuck shrugged it off. But he took his phone back.

_**Now what?**_

_**Now we wait.**_ Sarah replied.

Even without the glow-sticks, Chuck realized it wouldn't have been completely dark inside the flooded ship. Lisa's revenge had settled somewhat on her side, and one of the portholes had a partial view upward, of the sky, though at an angle that was a little disorienting. Sarah joined him at the porthole, peering out. Chuck saw the shark first, and pointed, before grabbing his phone back.

_**I think we need a bigger boat!**_

Even with the dive gear obstructing her face, he could tell she glaring at him.

It was a fairly uneventful couple of hours before the pirates gave up and the sharks finished their own bit of business with Garret and friends in and around _Lisa's Revenge_. Sarah's depth gauge on her dive computer only read forty-five feet, which was puzzling, but not necessarily that important. It might have been just a ripple in the ocean floor, and so she didn't bother mentioning it to Chuck.

Once she was satisfied that the waters were clear of predators, both of the finned and of the two-legged varieties, they each switched to fresh tanks and unsealed the galley door. Chuck and Sarah swam out to the forward deck where Chuck had tied down the Zodiac, and a quick swipe of Sarah's diving knife had the inflatable boat cut free and bobbing quickly to the surface.

Sarah grabbed Chuck before he could follow it upward straight off, and took his phone away for a moment.

_**Decompression. Very important. **_She tapped onto the screen, and Chuck nodded.

They made two stops, holding onto the rope that trailed down to them from the Zodiac. They used as much of the last tanks as they could, nearly a full hour between the stops, before they broke the surface. The Zodiac had drifted, tugging them along with it, and the wreck of _Lisa's Revenge_ was a couple hundred yards distant along the bottom. The sun was on its way down, but still a fair bit above the horizon. It was nearly seven, by her watch. And sunset wouldn't be more than an hour or so off.

Sarah cut her tanks free before climbing into the rubber boat. They were pretty much dead weight at the moment. Chuck followed suit and they sat for a couple minutes in relative silence, except for the sound of Chuck's deep breathing. He was savoring every lungful now that they were back topside. She arched an eyebrow at him. "I guess scuba isn't really your thing after all."

"Well," Chuck said. "Most people their first dive is a little less... exciting."

"Granted," Sarah chuckled. She hauled herself up from lying along one side of the boat and shuffled back to start the outboard.

She pulled the string and nothing happened. Sarah cursed under her breath and tried again. Several times. Finally the cursing was no longer under her breath.

"Something wrong?"

"It's supposed to be able to start. I saw this YouTube video and everything."

"I..." Chuck started. "Um. I think that's a special model. You know, for the military? Where did you guys get this one?" Sarah glared at him, and then shrugged. "Dad got it from some guy he knows. I didn't want to know the details, if you understand?" He let the subject die.

When he came over to try and help, Sarah glared at him some more.

"What, do you think I don't know how to start an outboard?"

"No, you probably know better than me, I just," Chuck said. He grimaced. "Well, here's _a _problem. I don't know if it's _the _problem."

"What's that?"

"The bullet holes were the major tip-off," he said, pointing.

"Son of a bitch!" Sarah growled. "What the hell! All that gunfire, and the thing gets shot in the engine, but somehow the hull doesn't take anything?"

Chuck shrugged. "So does that mean we're stranded?"

Sarah shook her head and pointed. "No. Luckily we still have the oars," they were strapped securely to the inside of the bottom of the Zodiac. She shrugged out of her backpack. "Still, we've got to be fifty miles from land. So, the satellite telephone in a waterproof baggie in here is probably out best bet."

Sarah pulled out the bag and unsealed the zip-close, pulling out the satellite phone and extending the antenna. She pushed the power button for three seconds as the user manual dictated, if memory served. But nothing happened.

"Oh, come on!" She tried again.

"Sarah," Chuck said in a calm that came from he didn't know where. "When was the last time you charged that thing?"

She shrugged. "A couple months ago when I put the bag together, why?"

"Nickel metal hydride batteries only keep their charge for maybe a month," he said. "Battery's dead."

Sarah cursed like a sailor. Which, Chuck guessed, was fair. She reared back to throw the thing into the ocean in anger.

Chuck lurched forward and grabbed her wrist. "Whoa there! I might have an idea. May I?" Sarah relinquished the sat-phone, and Chuck pried the back off the battery compartment briefly.

"What are you thinking?"

He replaced the back of the Sat-phone and dug out his cell. "I'm thinking I might be able to wire the sat-phone to my cell-battery. But..." He made sure his hands were dry before he peeked briefly at the battery in his phone. "You have a pen and paper? We'd only get one shot at this. And all the salt water vapor in the air, the contacts might corrode if we're not careful. We can't afford to short out either of these."

Sarah searched through her emergency backpack and found an old Bic disposable ball-point pen, but the exposure to the pressure, even at forty feet below, had cracked the case, and water had gotten into the ink. She didn't have any paper to go with it. "I'd better put the sat-phone away again, huh?"

"Yes." Silence while she put the sat phone away in its waterproof bag and Chuck turned off his cell-phone to preserve the battery. It was already down to about twenty percent according to his charge readout. "So," he finally said. "I guess we better start rowing? Any clue on a direction?"

Sarah squinted. "Sunset gives us a rough westerly, but this time of year, at this latitude it'll be off somewhat." She did some racking of her brain, and then pointed. "Island of Luzon is that way, but we're drifting north. Might be the wind, might be a current. Either way we'll have to fight it to keep going east. And we might miss it entirely if we're not on a true bearing."

"What you're saying is rowing is out?"

"It's not exactly going to be very fast, is the main thing, and we could tire ourselves out pretty good, use up all our fresh water. I've got a couple canteens, but that's maybe two days of water for both of us, if we stretch it."

Chuck frowned. "You hear that?"

Sarah cocked her head. "Seagulls."

"We could follow them in!"

She shook her head. "That's not a sure thing, Chuck. They can range for miles out to sea."

"But it's evening, right. Won't they be heading back toward land to roost for the night?"

"Or they could be roosting on a tiny little atoll someplace and if we use up our water exerting ourselves to get there we're screwed."

"The only people who _might_ come back to look for us are the pirates," Chuck said. "We're screwed anyway."

Sarah chewed her lip for a moment, and then broke out the oars. She passed one to Chuck grimly. "If this doesn't work, you're going to have to try the thing with the phones, salt air or no."

"I know," he sighed, dipping his oar into the water.

"One thing I don't get," Chuck said in between paddling after the sound of the gulls.

"Yeah, what's that?"

"How did garret and the jerk brigade find us," he frowned. "Your dad gave them the wrong coordinates, they should have been like thirty miles away. They couldn't have seen us at that distance could they?"

"Probably not," Sarah said. "Unless they had some really bitching field glasses. No, it's probably something much simpler. Garret knows ab— knew about the boat. He could have had one of his guys drop a GPS transmitter on it while we were at the hospital." Her voice lost the speculative edge as she went on. "That's probably why they let dad go in the first place. If they suspected he wasn't telling the truth... I mean, I doubt they've got anybody on the payroll who's really experience at torturing somebody. It's not exactly that common of a skill."

"Thankfully."

"Yeah," Sarah said. "Garret isn't— wasn't a complete idiot. Just... a crook. He'd have been smart enough to know Dad would give me the real coordinates and I might just run off without sweeping the boat. Stupid. My fault really."

"Hey," Chuck said. "Neither of us thought of it. It's both our faults or- no. It's the bad guys' faults. We didn't come on _their_ boat with guns and threaten to _shoot_ everybody. You want to get angry at somebody. Get angry at those guys who got away with the case. Shit! We still don't even know what all this is about."

Sarah put a hand on his knee. "Thanks for not blaming me."

He shrugged. "Don't worry about it." They kept paddling, chasing the seagulls toward land. Hopefully.

It was sunset that let them find the island, cast in silhouette against the disc of the sun. Chuck let out a whoop, calling land ho! Like a sailor of old and setting Sarah off in a fit of nervous giggles. He didn't really know what came over him, but he pulled her close and kissed her.

She was surprised more than anything at first, but she didn't pull away for a long time. When she finally did, it was to remind him they weren't finished paddling.

Full dark was falling by the time they rowed the Zodiac through the breakers. The tide was on its way in, luckily enough, and Chuck and Sarah were nearly wrung out by that point anyway. They made landfall on a black sand beach and Chuck collapsed to kiss the ground. Sarah nudged him with a toe, and he managed to haul himself to his feet. They dragged the zodiac with them up the beach at Sarah's insistence. They couldn't afford to lose the boat when the tide went back out.

The beach wasn't very large, only a couple hundred yards wide, and maybe a quarter of that deep, butting up against a cliff-face only a fifty yards or so from where they came ashore. There was a fold in the cliff-face nearby above the high-tide line. Not quite a cave, but with just enough overhang to give them some shelter from the heat of the day on the morrow.

Chuck and Sarah sank down onto the sandy floor of the not-quite-cave, winded from hauling the zodiac.

He let out a sigh, and laughed briefly. It was contagious, a resumption of the giddy realization they'd had when they had first spotted the island. Finally they wound down. "Well, I guess it could be worse," Chuck said before he could stop himself."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Come _on, _really?" she said as the first drops of rain landed on her arm. "You know better than that."

Chuck shook his head. "No, you come on!" He turned and shook his fist at the rainclouds, nearly invisible against the sky. "It's the other way around. I say: 'At least it can't get _any _worse,' and then it starts raining. Where's your sense of drama, rain-gods?"

Sarah poked him in the side. "If maybe we flip the Zodiac we can get some more shelter from the rain. I don't think the cliff is going to help us much."

"Yeah," Chuck said, exhaustion creeping into his voice. It took some doing, and the rain was quickening all the time, but Chuck and Sarah got the Zodiac flipped and over their heads. They carried it the last few yards like a turtle shell against the rain, and wedged the thing crosswise in the opening of their natural shelter.

They huddled together for warmth, listening to the storm grow in fury and shivering in their rain-damp clothes.

Thunder roared somewhere out over the water and a gust tumbled the zodiac in on top of them. Sarah lay half-on top of him, when the dust had settled, chewing her lip. "You know, when I stopped you earlier... it wasn't... it didn't seem like you were finished kissing me."

"Yeah," Chuck said. "I wasn't."

"Good. I wasn't finished kissing you either."

Their lips met. The rain drummed above them on the underside of the Zodiac. One thing led to another.

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

><p>AN: Reviews are the candy coating that slowly gives me diabetes. But... in a good way? That metaphor needs some work, but the point remains: please review. And don't be bashful about telling me when something doesn't work. I've got a thick skin.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11:

Chuck awoke to the smell of smoke underneath the overturned zodiac. His clothes were missing, and it was a little chilly; the stone under his back had leeched away a lot of his body heat. After a little groping around blindly in the dark, he found his boxers and cargo shorts and wriggled awkwardly into them before tipping the zodiac up to let some light in.

His clumsy groping in the darkness had happened to reveal a notable lack of blond goddessy fellow castaway. The light revealed where his shirt and his swim shoes had gotten to during the fray last night. Chuck crawled out from under their shelter, and sat on the upturned hull to slip his footgear on. He scanned the beach and spotted Sarah, back turned to him and sitting cross-legged on the sand halfway down the beach. The smoke was curling up in front of her, so she must have had some waterproof matches or something in her emergency pack. Her hair hung in a loose pony tail halfway down her back, mostly bare except for the bow tie of her string bikini. She had put her wetsuit back on, but it was pooled around her waist.

He tugged his shirt on over his head and started over. After two steps he froze, and went back to find his rifle. It was probably perfectly safe to leave it with the zodiac, but it was a reassuring weight hanging from the sling on his back.

She heard the crunch of his feet on the black sand beach. "We've got crabs!" Sarah said cheerfully over her shoulder.

"Wh-wh-what?" Chuck nearly choked on the words, staring at her in shock and freezing in his tracks.

Sarah turned to look at him more fully, frowned momentarily, then clapped a hand to her mouth, blushing. "No, not... I mean... for breakfast," she turned back and pulled a skewer out of the fire, with a largish crab carcass spitted neatly. After a moment he recognized it as one of the spears from the spear-gun laying beside her in the sand. He breathed a sigh of relief and went and sat down next to her. She glared halfheartedly. "Seriously? That's where your mind goes first?"

Chuck shrugged uncomfortably. "I just... you said 'we've got crabs.' There's not of a lot of alternate interpretations involved."

"Yeah, just the one that involves seafood, considering we're on an island?"

"Okay. I'm sorry my mind went to the bad place. Could you at least admit to a poor choice of words and we'll speak no more of this? We've got to have more pressing concerns, right?"

"You're probably right. Here," she said, holding the skewer out to him, "I already ate."

"You mind if I ask how you managed to scare up actual food so quickly?"

She snorted a laugh, "They burrowed in under the zodiac with us. I woke up while they were playing tug of war with my bikini top. You were out like a light; you didn't so much as roll over when I yelled in surprise."

"Yelled in surprise. You mean you screamed."

"I stand by me version of events," Sarah said, "Anyway, let's do an inventory of supplies."

She began laying out the contents of her emergency backpack while Chuck started his breakfast. Two canteens, two boxes of energy bars, a handful of glow-sticks, a small flare-gun and a couple of flares, the dead sat-phone in its waterproof sleeve- a small square orange package caused him to raise an eyebrow and point questioningly-

"Emergency blanket," Sarah explained, as she kept pulling more gear from the bag. A survival knife with a 10 inch blade, which she passed wordlessly in Chucks direction. There was a compass in the pommel, and sure enough it screwed off to reveal a handful of matches and needle and thread, fishhooks and line. Chuck grinned.

"I feel like Rambo. Do I get a bandana?"

Sarah rolled her eyes, and kept pulling out survival gear. She passed him a bright green bracelet which puzzled him for a moment before she explained. "12 feet of milspec para-cord. Always good to have." Chuck spotted a similar bracelet on Sarah's wrist, though in neon orange. Next came a pair of small flashlights, made of clear plastic. His curiosity got the better of him, and he scooped one of the flashlights up. As he tilted the plastic tube a weight shifted inside, and he frowned, making a more thorough examination. "Oh, cool," he said when he got it. "The weight is a copper wire loop, and there are a couple magnets inside. Magnetic flux induction. Never run out of batteries!"

"Yeah, if only that would work on the sat-phone."

Chuck blinked. "I probably _can_ make that work, actually; might even be easier than trying to draw from my cell battery, when I think about it. Lower current than my cellphone, means I won't need to figure out how to jury rig a specific ohmage resistor."

"Homage? What?"

"O.H.M.S., are the unit of measurement in electronic resistance. I'll spare you the intro to electrical engineering seminar and say these flashlights turned like a week-long project into maybe a day; two at the outside."

"You would have thought of it eventually."

"I'll still want to draw all this out in the sand before I wire anything up, so I don't mess up. And we'll use my cell as a test-bed before we risk the sat-phone," he reined in the huge grin that accompanied figuring out a way to send for help. "That's assuming we know where to send the coast guard when we call in?"

Sarah had been pulling more gear out as he spoke, laying a 9mm pistol and the handful of spare shotgun shells out on a small last thing out of Sarah's emergency back was a small set of nautical charts laminated against potential water damage."That's my department," Sarah declared. She uncapped the cracked Bic pen; despite the lack of ink, the tungsten ball-point would score the laminate plastic with ease. Finding the coordinates of Sarah's dive was the simplest part. From there, they didn't know for certain which direction they had gone; Sarah had spun the wheel to try and swamp the pirates' smaller boat, and then they had gone full bore for about five or six minutes. At twenty one knots that worked out to a circle about two miles wide, and from there things got more arcane still. Before they had set off following the gulls in a vague northerly direction they had drifted for almost half and hour. Sarah was of the opinion that the current probably hadn't had enough time to make the circle of uncertainty grow much more. Finally they had to account for two hours of rowing. Knowing the general direction of this final leg of the journey only served to transform their potential position from a relatively neat ring a couple miles wide into a bizarre amoeba with hash marks scoring the protective plastic coating the charts.

Nowhere in the area of their potential position was an island. "So now we know for sure," Chuck said. "We're on a deserted, uncharted island. I guess I'd better get started on my circuit diagrams."

Sarah shook her head. "They'll take you what, an hour?"

"More like ninety minutes."

She pointed out a cloud bank off to seaward. "Storm will wipe those out. Better to wait and look for better shelter until then. Or a freshwater supply."

"We could let the zodiac fill up with rainwater, couldn't we? That will give us a couple days water supply, yeah?"

"Be kind of nasty, but drinkable," Sarah said. "It's a good back up plan. We'll need to find something to plug up the scuppers though."

Sarah reloaded the shotgun and slung it over her shoulder. She and Chuck split up the supplies into their backpacks and worked together to wrestle the zodiac into position at the bottom of the cliff a little way off from the underhang where they had spent the night. Rain and runoff from the cliff would combine to give them a couple liters of hopefully drinkable water when the storm broke. Trusting their water supply solely to the rain didn't strike either Chuck or Sarah as a good idea, even though showers were shaping up to be an everyday occurence so far.

"So..." Chuck said when they were satisfied with their rain collector. They scanned the area more closely than they had managed the night before.

Their black sand beach was cut off at the near side by the steep crooked cliff-face where they had taken refuge. It protruded a good fifty feet into the water, and there was no guarantee they would find more beach close by if they got around the point.

At the far end of the beach, the cliff was shorter, only ten yards, and a slope bearing a tumble of boulders rather than a solid cliff face. Sarah shouldered her spear-gun and led the way in that direction, in search of their first and most pressing need, for fresh water.

"If we find some trees maybe we can make a bed or something. It'd almost have to be softer than the rock in that under-hang last night."

Chuck nodded and didn't say anything as they trudged up the slope. Neither of them had mentioned what had happened last night after the wind had tipped the zodiac over on them, shutting them off into their own little world.

She sighed and stopped in her tracks. "I'm sorry I didn't remember the thermal blanket until this morning. We'd have been a lot warmer."

"Well, we were both... under a lot of... stress," Chuck said.

Sarah laughed. "Is that what we're calling it now?" She blushed faintly, and conversation lapsed. Neither of them was ready to address that particular elephant in the room just yet.

Any hope that making it to the top of the cliff would give them a better picture of the layout of the island was crushed when they got up the first bit of slope. The cliff-line had been hiding a second taller cliff. At least there were a number of trees atop the shorter beach-side line of cliffs. The trees themselves were scrawny things, bereft of leaves or needles, or whatever; Chuck couldnt make an immediate guess as to whether they were supposed to be conifers or deciduous, so stunted and wind wracked were they. The trees had sunk tendrils into bare stone somehow. By unspoken agreement, Chuck and Sarah left the poor disheveled trees unmolested and they headed up along the cliff overlooking their landing beach. The other direction merely showed another narrow stretch of beach with an imposing set of cliffs above. Judging from the little Chuck and Sarah had seen of the island's coastline, they had been lucky to both to find a way up the cliffs, and to have found an actual beach to put in at.

They made good time up to the point of their beach-overlooking cliff but the storm that had been threatening hit while they were nearing the top. Chuck and Sarah only got a quick glimpse of a long expanse of beach fifty or sixty feet straight down, before the wind picked up and they had to huddle under the thermal blanket and think like rocks so they didn't get buffeted off the cliff by the wind. Chuck's arm curled around her waist easily and Sarah found once again that her head fit perfectly into the little niche formed by his neck and shoulder.

The storm, if it could be called that, only lasted a few minutes, and probably only gave them half an inch or less of rain. Chuck did the math with the remembered dimensions of the zodiac and predicted maybe a liter worth of collected freshwater. If they stretched the water currently in their canteens they might turn it into another days' worth of water. The math on that one was worrisome. Three days withough water, or three weeks without food was pretty much a death sentence. They had food covered. 12 energy bars each was maybe a weeks' worth of backup food supply if they found the island barren. Each of the canteens however, only held a liter, barely enough to stave off dehydration for a day, if they didn't lose a lot of moisture to sweat. The shower had cut the temperature back, but the mercury had already been rising by then.

It was only mid-morning; by noon the cooling of the brief shower would be obliterated, and Chuck and Sarah would begin to sweat to death if more water wasnt forthcoming. From the point of the cliff that poked out into the water, they got a better view of the larger beach, and Chuck grinned. There was a rocky outcropping a couple hundred yards down the beach, another outflung arm of the cliff-face they were following, with a rather imposing stone building near the waterline.

"Civilization!" he crowed. "Is that a dock?"

Sarah took a pair of binoculars from her pack and held her breath as she investigated. Those hadnt been in the inventory. She must have been holding out. Chuck decided not to mention it when she snarled a curse.

"Looks abandoned. The dock's just a handful of stone pilings. Must have been a big stone dock at some point. Building looks half collapsed up close. Worth a look though if we can get down there."

"Maybe an old Spanish fort. They had a bunch of little bases out here, back in the old days, didn't they?"

"Let's hope its a little more recent than that, okay? I doubt anything useful would have lasted two hundred years or more, you know."

"Buzz-kill," Chuck grumbled. "I seem to remember you already found your chest of Spanish doubloons."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Pretty sure they'd have taken all that with them when they abandoned the place."

"This only lends credence to my Buzz-kill accusation, Ms. Walker."

Sarah shrugged and pressed her lips together, conceding the point. Finding a way down to the ruins on the second beach was a little more complicated than it seemed. The path that appeared to be heading that direction turned back on itself, and it was slick from the rainwater washing down it to boot.

"We probably should have gone back and just swum around the point," Chuck said after the second time he had nearly lost his footing.

"No argument here," Sarah said, and cocked her head to one side.

"What's up?"

"Shut up," she hissed. "Do you hear that?"

Chuck grimaced at the illogic of those two thoughts expressed so close together, and strained his ears listening. "Sounds like a stream or something."

"Or something," Sarah smirked. "Jackpot, Chuck, c'mon!"

The path began winding back and forth, the sides deepening until it became an obvious gully; if there had been much more rain, it might have been a stream at least briefly. The sides deepened further, and after one last hairpin turn, the gully entered a small cave.

There was about an inch and a half of standing water, in a large puddle, cool in the shade of the cave entrance. Chuck breathed a sigh of relief and took a long drink from his canteen. He refilled it while Sarah got out her canteen and followed his lead. The sound of rushing water echoed from further inside the cave.

"What do you think?" Chuck said, "Underground river?"

She just shrugged. "One way to find out."

Just a handful of yards into the cave, the ceiling was noticeably lower; Chuck nearly clocked his head, but Sarah warned him in time. He fished his flashlight out of his pack, and shook it briefly, to let the weight inside generate a little extra charge before he flicked it on.

The passage narrowed up ahead until it was barely a few inches wider than Chuck's shoulders, and only three feet or so tall.

Chuck played the light against the wall, crouching and crab-walking forward.

"You see something?"

He nodded. "These look like tool-marks; might have been the Spanish from that ruin on the beach we spotted."

"What would they have been doing up here?" Sarah wondered aloud.

"Beats me," Chuck shrugged. "Maybe they found this same cave and had to widen it for some reason."

"Assuming that's true then, you think it'll take us down to the beach?"

He grinned. "One way to find out."

Sarah stuck out her tongue at him.

Thankfully, the passage didn't narrow much further. Tool-marks became more common as they went, and after a while, Sarah had Chuck turn off the flashlight. "See," she said. "There's light coming through from somewhere."

Another twenty yards of slow crawling down the tunnel and it opened up into an octagonal chamber open to the sky. There were half a dozen tiny waterfalls coming down at the edges of the ten foot wide hole in the ceiling and filling a huge stone basin. Designs carved into the edges of the basin confirmed the old Spanish origins of the place.

"It's the cistern," Sarah said as recognition took hold. "They must have been using this island as a resupply station. I know first hand. Things can get pretty sketchy aboard ship when the fresh water runs out. They probably had a fruit orchard someplace on the island as well to help fight scurvy for the crews. Well,the captains anyway."

"I'm just glad its here," Chuck said. He took another quick drink from his canteen and stooped to fill it back up. "Looks like that's our water problem solved."

"Yeah, looks like," she said. Something in her voice gave Chuck a moment's warning. He turned and caught the mischief in her eyes before she nudged him in the back with her foot, just hard enough to send him headfirst into the cistern.

Chuck came up, sputtering. The water came up nearly to his shoulders. "Hey, dammit, it's _cold _in here!"

Sarah set down her pack and weaponry at the edge before joining him in the water. She gasped and shivered. "You weren't kidding," she said softly as she padded over close to him. "I'd better help you warm up."

Chuck shivered, but not from the cold, as her arms went around his neck. One thing led to another. _Again._

* * *

><p>Afterward, they sat side by side on the edge of the water basin, feet dangling in. Chuck frowned. "Something wrong?" Sarah said while she finished redoing the ties on her bikini.<p>

"Just..." Chuck shrugged awkwardly. "In hindsight, we probably shouldn't have done that in our water supply."

Sarah's laugh ended in a snort that nearly became a coughing fit. Chuck slapped her on the back and she recovered quickly. "Yeah," she said. "Sorry. Didn't think that one out very well, did I?"

"Not a complaint, don't think-" Chuck cut himself off.

"Gotcha." The silence became awkward again. "You think we should bother heading back to the zodiac? We left our swim-fins and snorkels and stuff, but I'm thinking we should move camp over to this beach instead. We could just swim around the point; wouldn't have to crawl through the tunnel again that way."

"I'm all for moving closer to the freshwater," Chuck said, "but first let's follow the trail down to the beach. It might not be easy to spot from the other direction, so we should mark the path."

The tunnel in the far side of the chamber was taller, though Chuck still had to stoop so he wouldn't knock himself out on the ceiling. It wound back and forth, still descending, until they came out into thick jungle.

Chuck had to chop through some vines growing across the entrance to the cistern-cave with his survival knife. Once the was done, Sarah confiscated his orange para-cord bracelet and cut it into foot-long pieces with her diving knife. The green of her matching accessory might blend in too well. They followed the sound of the surf, and Sarah tied little orange para-cord bows around tree branches to mark the path out to the beach.

Sand crunched under their feet, and Chuck led the way to the ruined Spanish fort. It wasn't much to look at; Sarah's assessment from the cliffs above had been accurate enough. On the inside it was little better. There were cracks in one of the walls, but the roof was still mostly on, which was pretty impressive after four or five hundred years of storms and erosion.

The ruin was divided into two chambers. One had obviously been the main storage area, with broken, empty water and supply barrels still littering the floor. On closer inspection, there was a small stone desk set out of the way near the door, bearing a heavy wood-bound logbook. Sarah blew the dust off and opened the cover very carefully. The pages were dry and brittle, a testament to the quality of the ruin's roof if nothing else.

"You read Spanish?" Chuck asked.

"No, you?"

Chuck just shook his head.

"I guess we can use it for kindling. Same with the barrels."

"But this is probably an archeologically important site," Chuck protested.

Sarah rolled her eyes. "I'd rather we were alive to tell somebody about it, instead of becoming a part of it, yeah?"

Chuck frowned. "Okay, point taken. If we find something to write with, I could use the scratch paper. Any blank pages at the back?"

Sarah flipped the logbook over, riffling pages. "Like fifty or so," she said, closed the book and thrust it at him. "Here, you carry it."

Chuck grinned. "Carrying your books, does this mean we're going steady?"

Sarah blinked at him. "You really want to have that talk _now_?"

His eyes widened, realizing he'd unintentionally mentioned the 300 pound gorilla in the room. "Um, sorry. Let's just go back to awkwardly not talking about it."

"Okay," Sarah said airily, leading the way into the other chamber.

"That was sarcasm," Chuck grumbled under his breath.

The other chamber was larger, and must have been a combination barracks-kitchen. There was a large fire-pit with centuries-old ashes and charcoal remnants. Chuck stooped and pulled out a bit. He flipped the logbook open and tried it on a used page. "Nice," Chuck said, "No more worrying about a storm messing up sand-diagrams."

"Cool, you want to get started, I'll see about getting us some lunch?" Sarah patted her spear-gun.

* * *

><p>It was closer to dinner, when Sarah actually caught something. Chuck helped clean the pair of large tropical fish she had caught, while Sarah started the fire with driftwood and kindling torn from the used pages of the logbook.<p>

They ate in companionable silence. "So," Chuck said when they had both eaten. "I think I'm ready for a trial run, on my cellphone."

"Need me to do anything?"

"Hold the flashlight? Sunset's not too far off, and I'm losing the light."

"No problem."

It took Chuck longer than he thought to wire his phone into the leads from the first shake-powered flashlight, but just before sunset, he was finished.

"Moment of truth," Chuck said, and flipped on the power switch to his phone. After the usual start-up noises, his phone chirped again. "What the hell?"

Chuck stared incredulously at the glowing screen.

"What?" Sarah asked, "Did it work or not? Chuck, are you alright?"

"I don't... I don't understand," Chuck stammered.

"What is it, Chuck, what's wrong?"

He showed her the screen. "I... have wi-fi..."

Sarah's eyebrows attempted to climb off her face. They weren't alone on the island.

TO BE CONTINUED...

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><p>AN: Now there's a cliffhanger! Only a few more chapters to go before the end, so keep those reviews coming and I'll try to get my time between chapters back under a week.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12:

Sarah dumped some water on the back of his head to wake him. Chuck gasped and flailed his arms and sputtered for a moment before he gathered himself enough to glare up at her.

"Morning, sunshine," she said. "Time to track down that WiFi signal."

"You couldn't find a different way to wake me up?"

She shrugged. "I tried nibbling your ear while you slept. You just mumbled something happy sounding and tried to go back to spooning. I thought it might get weird to escalate much beyond that, so. Cold water."

Chuck grumbled under his breath and looked around for his clothes. They were missing again this morning.

Things between them remained... unquantified... and Chuck was beginning to think that maybe her continued reluctance to broach the subject was laden with hidden meaning. The night before, they had decided to wait until morning to set out in search of the WiFi transmitter, and one thing had lead to another. More than once, as it happened, but neither of them could seem to come up with the courage to ask, much less answer, the big questions in the cold light of day.

Chuck's phone was back up to about 40 percent battery, according to the readout, but the WiFi signal was trickier than he thought.

His iPhone's standard WiFi detection only gave him a signal indicator in bars, not in percent, and remained stubbornly at 0 bars no matter where he went on the beach, which would make using it as a dowsing rod of sorts a little inefficient. Sarah unwrapped an energy bar and nibbled unenthusiastically while Chuck worked. His sideline programming iPhone apps came in handy, and it only took him fifteen minutes to hack in some truly ugly code.

"So," Sarah said when he was finished. "What did all that mad typing accomplish?"

He turned the phone so she could see. "Instead of the regular app, this one re-purposes the GPS receiver and the WiFi antenna, and okay..." he paused and changed tactics when her eyes started to glaze over, "Imagine that WiFi signal is magnetic north; I just turned my phone into a compass."

"Oh, cool," Sarah said, turning in place slightly to test things out. "So we just follow the arrow?"

"Yup."

She smooched him on the cheek and grinned toothily. "Anybody ever tell you how awesome you are?"

He laughed. "Yes, but I prefer it coming from you than from Captain Awesome."

"Who?"

"Ellie's fiance."

"And you actually call your sister's boyfriend..."

"Captain Awesome, yes," Chuck said. "Because everything he does is awesome. White-water rafting, skydiving, bungee jumping. Flossing."

Sarah laughed and shook her head. "Yes, well, right now I'd settle for being able to brush my teeth."

"I know," Chuck said accusingly. "You packed everything else. Next time toss some Colgate in the emergency backpack, will ya?"

She stuck her tongue out at him and they set off into the jungle.

Using Chuck's cellphone WiFi signal strength to sniff out the other people on the island, whoever they were, wasn't as easy as it seemed. Of course, nothing had gone strictly to plan for him this week. After only a hundred yards following the arrow on his custom-built iPhone, they ran into a ravine. The jungle just stopped for ten feet or so, falling away in a knife-edged abyss of bare stone in either direction. "What the hell kind of island is this," Chuck demanded, "Cliffs, mountains, ravines? What's next a desert?"

"In all fairness to the island, Chuck? "This is probably just more of that first stone formation."

Chuck grumbled under his breath. "Still doesn't help. How many extra miles are we going to have to walk now?"

"You're just grumpy because you didn't eat breakfast. Have an energy bar, and I'll try and think of something."

Chuck peered down the ravine and sighed, and rooted in his backpack. He had never much cared for the things, and finding them his only sure food supply wasn't improving his opinion of them. By the time he was finished, Sarah came tromping back out of the jungle, a spool of freshly cut vine looped around her body.

"You sure you weren't a lumberjack in a previous life?"

"Please," she said, "All I did was cut down a vine."

"To make a rope bridge out of!"

"Yeah, but now that I've got the thing, I don't really know how to do this," she admitted.

"Oh, right. Huh," Chuck said. "We could make a lasso and throw it over that stump."

"Great!" Sarah said. "You know how to make a lasso?"

Chuck seemed to deflate. "I was hoping you'd know. Can't we just make a huge slipknot in the vine?"

Sarah took the spool of vine off and played with the ends. "I don't know, if the bark or skin or whatever cracks it might not support our weight. It might be safer in the long run to just go around."

She frowned and peered across the ravine, judging the distance again. "Oh! I've got an idea."

"Lay it on me."

"Easier to just show you." Sarah unspooled the vine, counting off every loop. "I think we've got about fifty feet of vine, that stump can't be twenty feet away, you think?"

"Closer to fifteen, I'd guess. I think I'm catching on to your plan. It should work."

"Good. So I'm not crazy?"

Chuck laughed. "I never said _that_. But this will probably work."

She glared at him briefly, and began playing out the vine in a long 'U' shape with the open end facing away from the ravine. With Chuck holding on securely to the loose ends behind her, Sarah flipped the 'bottom' half of the 'U' back over the both of them, took a quick couple steps toward the edge and whipped the center section of vine over the ravine. It fell a couple of feet short of the stump, and Chuck and Sarah had a quick brainstorming session while he reeled the line back in.

It took them three more tries before they got the vine hooked over the stump. From there Chuck and Sarah tied the two loose ends that remained on their side of the ravine around the boles of sturdy-looking nearby trees.

Of course then, they couldn't agree who should go first. "I'm heavier. I should go first in case the vine breaks."

"I'm lighter," Sarah said. "And if it breaks it'll be on this side, where the knots are tied. It'll be easier if I'm already across to toss the vine back to you."

"And what if it breaks and you fall in the ravine?"

"Look, it's not even going to be an issue. If anyone's going to break the vine it's going to be you."

"Still," Chuck said. "He really didn't want to make her go across the untested vine-bridge first, but judging by the set of her jaw, his arguments hadn't been good enough."

And so Sarah inched her way across the ravine, upside down, legs wrapped around one line, and hanging with both hands from the other to spread her weight across the doubled vine. She made it across with little trouble.

Chuck frowned at the vines he needed to traverse and shook his head, shrugging out of his pack. "Here, let's not tempt fate, huh," he said and tossed his pack across the chasm. "Catch!"

Sarah cursed and had to lunge forward to snag one of the shoulder straps when his throw came up the teeniest bit short. "Sorry," Chuck grimaced, but she waved it off and set the pack aside.

"Don't throw the rifle, okay?"

Chuck nodded and attempted to duplicate the fairly acrobatic way that Sarah had crossed the gap, but he was notably heavier than she was, and his hands quickly started cramping up. He stopped, swaying in the air with the vine looped in the crook of his elbow as he caught his breath. "Uh, Chuck?" Sarah said. "You might want to cut the break short? Looks like the knots are coming loose."

Sarah leaned out as far as she could and grabbed hold of him as soon as he came in range, tugging him off the makeshift bridge just as the vine parted. They landed in a heap on the edge of the ravine. Sarah grunted.  
>"Ow, sorry," Chuck said, pushing up so he wasn't crushing her anymore. "You okay?"<p>

"Yeah," she said. "But no more rope bridges unless we take a class or something."

"I concur."

From there, the little arrow on the WiFi compass took them deeper into the jungle. Thick underbrush and vines stretched across the way, and Chuck and Sarah had to take turns with the heavy survival knife hacking away at the vegetation in order to make any headway. It was sweaty work, even trying to skirt around the heaviest concentrations of vines, and before they had gone a mile, both Chuck and Sarah had emptied their canteens. Chuck held his canteen upside down over his mouth and sighed when the last drop fell out onto his tongue. He wiped perspiration off his forehead and glanced back at the trail they had carved through the jungle. It was hard to see that there even was a trail, and he scowled to see it.

"How the heck are we going to get back?" he grumbled.

Sarah shifted her shotgun on its strap to get more comfortable. "If nothing else, we can follow the coastline around. It'll take longer, but... well, maybe not, if we're going through heavy jungle like this much longer. Still. There's got to be water, maybe shelter or something at this place that's transmitting WiFi, right? Maybe even, dare I say it? Air conditioning? Somebody will come back to check on the place eventually."

Chuck groaned. "Give me the knife."

"Okay," she said. "Why?"

"I think I'm getting a second wind. You said the magic words. Air conditioning!"

The jungle began to thin out in another couple hundred feet, and they didn't have to spend as much time hacking at vines. But Chuck noticed a decided incline to make up for it. He glanced at his phone and nodded. The signal strength was up to thirty percent. The math was a little fiddly, but the closer they got, the faster that number would rise. Where back at the beach they'd barely been getting 1 percent, it had taken nearly a mile to get to thirty percent. It was probably a third of that distance at most before they arrived at the tower. And it would have to be a substantial transmitter; no standard commercial wireless router would transmit that far, unless there were repeaters all over the island. He hadn't really thought about that part until now. The first thought that popped into his head was military. Some kind of government installation might have... it was another mystery, no way to know. He'd let himself forget about all the others, for the most part. Being stranded on a deserted island was bad enough without letting his brain kick around the other puzzles he had no way of solving. The coordinates, the case, all those dead bodies. He grimaced and shook his head, pressing on regardless. "We've got to be getting close now," he said.

Finally they came out into a clearing, a small rocky outcropping that protruded up above the canopy and gave a clear view of the island beyond the cliffs where they had washed ashore. For the first time, Chuck and Sarah got an idea of just how big the island was. Or how small. They had come more than half way across the island. From their vantage point, looking back, they could see the cliffs in the distance maybe a mile off. In the other direction, where the WiFi was coming from, was a verdant carpet of grass, with scattered stands of trees on a gentle slope with an out-flung arm of the jungle they had waded through screening most of the way down to beaches little more than half a mile away.

And there it was, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb, an old World War II bunker of some kind, surrounded by a razor-wire topped fence. The fence-line was right up against the edge of the jungle, threatening to be overrun in places where someone had been pruning back the vegetation. The pruning suggested that someone was still occupying the bunker.

Chuck's eyes widened. "Oh, no," he said.

"What?"

"You don't think... this is one of those islands where they never stopped fighting world war II? That could be pretty bad for us."

Sarah had her binoculars out, sweeping the compound. "Highly doubtful, WiFi, remember? And I don't think they had satellite dishes back in the 1940s either."

She passed the field glasses over and stood close so he could sight down her arm. "Huh," he said. "That looks like a new installation. Can't be more than ten years old."

"How can you tell?"

"The size of the dishes mostly," he said. "That and the generators are too small to be vintage. Somebody must have set up shop here fairly recently."

"So chances are good somebody will be around to roll out the welcome wagon," she said, leading the way down off the outcropping in the direction of the fence-line. Chuck squatted down and pulled his survival knife once more, testing the fence to see if it was electrified.

"Yay," he said softly. "I didn't get electrocuted."

"There wasn't a safer way to do that?"

He shrugged. "Probably, but I doubt those generators would have enough juice to power a high voltage fence anyway. Calculated risk. You got a wire cutter or something?"

"Should be one on the knife. That little notch at the back of the blade."

Chuck nodded and set to. He grunted with effort and one of the wires in the chain-link fence gave with an audible snap. "This is going to take a while."

"Hang on," Sarah said. "They're probably not going to look kindly on visitors, you think?"

"Why not? Security isn't all that tight. I don't see any cameras or anything. Not even a trespassers will be shot sign. And the fence isn't even electrified."

"Well, its an uncharted island. Why bother with signs?" she said. "But they bothered with the razor-wire, is my point."

"I was hoping you wouldn't think so too," Chuck said. "If it was just me, we could write it off as paranoia, and everything would work out fine. But, yeah, I've been getting a bad feeling about this place for a while."

"Uncharted island base. Best case it's pirates." Sarah scrunched up her nose and dug out her binoculars to make another scan of the compound.

"I was thinking military, but yeah. Pirates seems more likely, now that I think about it." Chuck scowled. He should have said something earlier, but the prospect of civilization had been too tempting. He'd tried to shut those frankly quite reasonable worries out of his head a little too well. "I suppose we could just head back to the beach, and rig the sat phone. I'm just thinking now, these people might have patrols out, and either way if it's the Philippine military or pirates. If we get spotted we're in for a not so warm welcome."

Sarah tensed. "Somebody is coming out. Get down, hurry," she hissed. They hid behind a nearby tree and Sarah shaded her binoculars with one hand. It wasn't perfect, but it should mitigate the chances of the men noticing a flare of sunlight off the lenses. An odd stuttering sound reached them across the expanse of cleared ground between Chuck and Sarah and the concrete bunker. Chuck quirked an eyebrow. "Is that?"

"A jeep," she said. "Yeah. Island's not that big. Must be some lazy pirates."

"Probably driving in supplies from the dock," Chuck said. "Did you see a dock? There's got to be one somewhere."

"I don't see one. Maybe it's on the far side of the bunker. Or past the jungle off on the right?" She shrugged. "I'm not- oh, crap."

"What is it?"

She shook her head and passed the binoculars to him again. He found the jeep easily enough, and could make out the occupants pretty well. "Is that one guy wearing a hood?"

"Yeah, Chuck," she said. "They've got a prisoner."

He put the binoculars down and slumped with his back against the tree. "They're going to kill him, aren't they?"

"Yeah, probably."

"They're not military."

"No," she said. "They're not in uniform. Which means they're pirates, and they're going to murder that guy."

"Well, then we've got to stop them."

Sarah heaved a much put-upon sigh. "I was afraid you were going to say that."

They followed the fence-line, trying to get as close to the men in the Jeep as possible while staying in the concealing jungle. "Did you see how they were armed?"

"AKs, same as Garret's goons," Sarah said. "But that doesn't necessarily mean anything. The AK 47 is like the Model T of guns, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but, it makes things easier on us," he said. "Assuming there's more of them in the bunker, they're expecting to hear a couple shots from one of these, right?" Chuck racked the charging handle on his AK and tucked the stock in tight to his shoulder. He swallowed nervously, and hoped Sarah didn't pick up on it.

It wasn't difficult to find the Jeep. The two probably-pirate gunmen had stopped within thirty feet of the fence-line, near one of the sections where the jungle had nearly overtaken the chain-link and razor-wire barrier.

Chuck and Sarah stopped and watched. Chuck frowned and whispered. "What are they arguing about?"

"Probably who has to dig the grave," she said softly. Chuck nodded, and the two men flipped a coin. The obvious loser began to dig. They would probably alternate shifts digging. "If we cut through the fence with the survival knife, they might hear it. Any ideas?"

Chuck glanced around, and then eyed Sarah. "What?" Sarah demanded.

"How attached are you to your wetsuit sleeves?"

She wriggled her arms out of her sleeves so Chuck could cut them free, and use the thick neoprene fabric to muffle the sound of metal on metal as he worked to cut a hole in the fence. Thankfully, the two men were still pre-occupied with their work, and judging from their tones, taunting the prisoner about his soon to be finished grave. It took Chuck and Sarah minutes that felt like hours to get a hole cut in the fence that would let them crawl through without painful scrapes or potential clothes snags. Chuck glanced up and saw the gunmen changing positions, the fresher man going down to begin his shift digging. Silence was paramount at the moment. Chuck went through the fence first, and stayed prone. Any sudden movements might draw the eye of either of the two gunmen. The grave was deepening; the soil must have been fairly loose. It wouldn't be long before they finished digging. Chuck wriggled closer, Sarah at his side, but stopped when he was close enough to be confident of his shot. About seventy feet, maybe eighty. Twenty five yards. It suddenly seemed like a hundred. Chuck tried to slow his breathing. Twenty five yards was doable. It was within pistol range and he had a rifle. Chuck swallowed again.

One of the gunmen headed back over to the Jeep and hauled the prisoner out, shoving him toward the grave. He shouted to the other man, and twenty five yards away, still hidden in the edge of jungle that had crept through the fence, Chuck couldn't quite make it out. But he knew what it meant. Only seconds now, before they would kill the prisoner and roll him into that shallow grave. Moment of truth.

He tapped Sarah on the shoulder and held up five fingers, then four, tucking the thumb in, before he put the AK back up to his cheek, still counting silently in his head.

Three. It was so different this time. He hadn't had time to think about it the first time, when he'd simply reacted.

Two. He'd seen the shadow of the gunman on the wall of the boathouse and turned, spraying and quite literally praying. This time, he was striking from ambush and if he'd had the luxury of another course of action, maybe he could have found a different way to handle it. The moment seemed to stretch out. But there were no other options. He couldn't sit back and watch a man be killed in cold blood.

One. So he would kill in cold blood. The horrible crushing, inescapable nature of the moment tried to seize his heart in a cold vise. His jaw tightened. Time's up.

Squeeze. Bring rifle down from recoil. Reacquire sight picture. Squeeze again. All in the space of a second, almost mechanical.

Two red blots in the man's back; one in the spine, one just left of center, only a couple inches apart. The gunman crumpled lifelessly to the ground and the prisoner stood stock still for just a moment before he dove to one side flat on his belly. Sarah was up and running, shotgun in hand even as the second shot echoed. Chuck was only a few steps behind her. The second one in the grave threw down his shovel and shouted something, not alarmed at first, just... Chuck imagined it being something along the lines of 'warn me before you do that, jerk,' thinking it had been his companion who fired the shots. He spotted the man's head poking out of the grave, the shock evident at suddenly staring down out the muzzle of Sarah's shotgun. "Don't," she said in a tone that brooked no nonsense. He went for his sidearm anyway, and Sarah's shotgun bucked in her hands.

Chuck went to the man on the ground. "It's alright," he said. His own voice surprised him. Calm, reassuring. How the hell could that be? "You're going to be alright, but we gotta get moving." Chuck pulled the hood from the prisoner's head and gaped in shock when he recognized the face behind the broken nose and black eye.

"_Bryce_?" Chuck said incredulously.

"_Chuck_?" Larkin groaned.

"What the hell are you doing here?" they said together.

TO BE CONTINUED...

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><p>AN: So... am I in trouble for that cliffhanger? Drop me a review and let me know. Like I said, we're coming up on the end of this story _fast._


	13. Chapter 13

A/N: Man, a lot of reviewers just _cringed _at the introduction of Bryce. Take deep breaths. He's not a PLI for _anybody_ in this story, trust me. He's here for the spy-plot exposition.

* * *

><p>Chapter 13:<p>

Sarah shook her head. "We don't have time for this," she said, already halfway over to the Jeep. "Cut him loose, grab a gun and let's go."

Chuck sawed through the rope binding Bryce's hands behind his back and started helping him to his feet. Any animosity he had toward his former friend had to be back-burner-ed for the moment. They had more important things to talk about, like what in _frak_ was going on. Bryce worked his wrists in little circles for a moment to get his circulation back before he stooped to pick up and methodically check-over the fallen gunman's dropped AK-47.

"We've actually got a couple minutes. The others were expecting _some_ gunfire," Bryce said, "and it would have taken these two a few minutes to fill my grave back in." He punctuated it by nudging the man Chuck had shot with the toe of his boot. Chuck blinked and tried to fight off a sudden bout of nausea. Dammit, he could freak out about _that_ later.

"_You_ want to take the chance, that's fine," Sarah said. "Me and Chuck will be taking this Jeep and trying to find the docks. You can find your own boat home."

Bryce chuckled. "Who's your girlfriend, Chuck? She's feisty."

"She's not my girlfriend," Chuck said almost instinctively.

"I'm _not__?" _Sarah demanded, head whipping around to fix him with a glare, and her voice a _touch_ on the shrill side.

Chuck blinked and stared at her with a sort of deer in the headlights expression on his face. "Well, uh... we never did talk about whether were were putting that kind of label on things... and you see... uhmmm..." The glare slowly ate into the stream of words until he trailed off uncomfortably.

Sarah beckoned him with a crook of her finger and he grimaced and trudged over.

She grabbed him as soon as he came within reach and put him in a headlock so she could whisper fiercely into his ear."You know that _thing_ that keeps happening that we both like so much?"

"Yes," Chuck said in a slightly strangled tone.

"That makes you my boyfriend. _Got_ it?" Sarah released the headlock and puffed her bangs out of her face. She plopped into the driver's seat and glared pointedly, awaiting his response.

"Yes..." Chuck said and tugged at the collar of his shirt nervously. "Just don't we need to talk about it some more?"

"Why? It should have been obvious from the start. Get in the car."

Chuck stared at her in shock for a moment. After a brief stunned speechless moment, his mouth dropped open and his lips worked silently to find a logical response while he digested this utterly foreign concept. His body moved to obey her commands and he slipped into the passenger seat with little awareness of his actions.

She hadn't been avoiding the subject. She just didn't think it was... necessary to talk about? His head spun briefly and he shook his head. He really didn't know her at all. The fact that he'd only just met her -three days ago!- intruded on his thoughts for probably the first time since they'd landed on the island.

When he finally came to terms with the shift in his worldview, he turned to find Bryce in the backseat already. Chuck turned awkwardly in his seat and waved toward Sarah. "This is my girlfriend, Sarah. Please keep your hands to yourself."

"Because I have a shotgun," Sarah put in, slipping the Jeep into reverse and beginning a three point turn. "Which should make my thoughts on the matter clear as well?"

"Of course," Bryce said, looking confused. He frowned deeply, and the Jeep lurched forward. Bryce leaned forward to point out which direction for her to take around the bunker. "I don't know why you think I need the warning. When have I ever- Jill? You told her about- I can't believe you're still upset about Jill! I never- Chuck, she was working for a rogue faction of the CIA who _made_ her break up with you. I was just a convenient scapegoat. And I never did anything to or with Jill, ever! I'm the one who told _you_about the 'bro-code' in the first place!"

"Seriously," Sarah said over her shoulder, "You have six years to think about it and that's the best lie you come up with?"

"What? I'm serious, she's in Federal Prison. We just found out like a month ago."

"Wait. You're... Sarah, he's not lying." Chuck said. "Jill's a traitor?"

"I don't know the whole story, but she helped plan a germ warfare attack on some conference in LA," he said. "So, yeah. Traitor."

Chuck's eyes widened. "I heard about that. Germ warfare! It was a gas leak."

"Well, there's gas leaks. And there's '_gas__leaks__.'_" The Jeep was passing its closest approach to the bunker as Sarah drove to where Bryce remembered the docks being. The bunker itself was still a good fifty or sixty yards off. Chuck spotted someone stick their head out, and let out a high pitched yell of alarm. The person had pretty good eyes to notice so quickly that something way amiss.

"Damn it," Bryce said softly, and shouldered his pilfered AK before Chuck or Sarah could react. He rippled off half a dozen rounds and the man disappeared back inside.

Bryce cursed again and shook his head. "Well, crap. Hit the gas, now!"

"Don't have to tell me twice!"

"Oh no! Bryce what have you _done__?_ Hold onto something!"

The gas pedal hit the floor with a metallic clunk and the engine roared. The Jeep lurched forward at almost literally break-neck speed, spewing gravel behind them.

Chuck and Bryce clung to the roll cage and the side of the Jeep respectively as the vehicle bounced over uneven stretches of the tiny gravel road that would hopefully lead to an escape route of some kind. "Dear god, who taught you to drive?" Bryce demanded. Sarah spun the wheel and slewed them into a turn, coming around the corner of the bunker to reveal a couple of small outbuildings, a dockhouse and a storage garage of some kind. They were only a few hundred yards away, which at the rate the Jeep was currently going, wouldn't take long at all.

"Crap!" Bryce shouted. "They've got another Jeep! Get us behind the doc-khouse, fast!"

The Jeep ate up the distance quickly, and in a bare handful of seconds, maybe ten at the most, Sarah shouted, "Hang onto your butts!" over the roaring engine and slammed them into a horribly sharp turn, mashing the brakes as she did.

More gravel was flung up as the Jeep went up briefly on two wheels, coming perilously close to flipping all three of them out. For what seemed like an eternity the Jeep teetered, before crashing back to all four wheels at a dead stop, shielded by the ramshackle dock-house from potential attack. At least for the moment.

Bryce hopped down from the back seat and the report of his AK jolted Chuck out of his relief that he had survived the full force of Sarah's maniacal driving once more.

His head turned just fast enough to see another gunman transfixed by the last couple rounds from Bryce's burst of automatic fire, and the man crumpled to the dirt.

"Anybody know how to hot-wire a boat?" he said in the same jaunty tone Chuck remembered from their time at Stanford. Bryce had just gunned a man down, and it hadn't made a dent in his flippant attitude.

Sarah came out of the shock at the violence faster than Chuck. "Just keep them off me for a few seconds," she ran for the dock, feet thumping on the wood. "Oh, hell. There's two boats!"

Chuck came back to himself and rushed over to where Bryce was taking cover by the dock-house. "Great. I had enough boat-chases for one week with the pirates!"

"Pirates, seriously?" Bryce grinned. "I've got to hear that story later." He leaned out of cover and let loose another long burst with the AK. Bullet-holes sprang up in the wood above their heads, and plumes of dirt where errant rounds hit the ground nearby. Bryce popped back into cover and ejected the magazine, reloading with a fresh one. He must have looted the man Chuck had killed more thoroughly while Sarah was making her boyfriend/girlfriend declaration. Chuck blinked and shook his head. He couldn't afford to let that thought distract him.

Two boats. Cover fire. He moved on autopilot, shuffling quickly in a crouch to the other corner of the dock-house and popping out for a brief burst from his own AK.

He ducked back into cover a split-second before he drew his own blast of return fire, and raised his voice to reach Sarah by the closer boat. "You got any of that C4 left!"

"Here!" came her reply, followed by a lobbed backpack.

"Hang on, _what__?_" Bryce demanded, eyes darting to the backpack Chuck was rummaging through. "How do you..."

"Long story," Chuck interrupted him with a shrug. "Short version, pirates. Hold them off while I get this thing built. How you doing on ammo?" The sound of enemy fire was a constant background to shout over.

"Last mag!" Bryce replied. Chuck grunted and fished in his back pack as he ran in a crouch back to the Jeep. He threw his spare AK mag underhand. Bryce caught it and tucked it away in the same movement as he turned to fire another burst toward their pursuers. Chuck hadn't got a good look in that direction, and figured Bryce knew what he was doing. He pulled his survival knife and pried open the panel under the steering column. He wasn't exactly an expert on bomb making, but he'd need some wires. It took him two yanks to pull the wires that connected the starter solenoid to the ignition completely free.

Chuck wracked his brain to make sure he remembered everything from his Electrical Engineering electives at Stanford. Hopefully it would be enough, and he wouldn't blow himself up accidentally.

Sarah wondered briefly what Chuck wanted with the C4, but she didn't let it stop her from acting. She slashed the mooring lines and took a brief pass checking where the throttle and the wheel were in the small boat, and went down a mental checklist. She kept her head down and checked the engine connections and fuel supply and nodded. Thankfully hotwiring it hadn't been necessary. They'd left the keys in the ignition.

She slipped over the side and crawled across the expanse of dock to the second boat. It was identical to the first in almost every respect, including the keys in the ignition. It took her a precious handful of seconds to saw through the mooring ropes on the second boat when they didn't give instantly as the first boat's had.

Sarah tried to predict whether the pirates or whoever it was on the island had anyone who could hot-wire a boat, and decided against merely throwing the second set of keys overboard. It wouldn't take her very long sabotage the engine beyond repair, but a faster solution came to her and she whipped the loop of para-cord remaining from her bracelet off over her head. She lashed it quickly to the wheel and threw a quick bowline knot around the nearby railing. That would keep the rope taut and the boat heading in one direction.

Sarah got the engine started, slammed the throttle to the red-line and dove back onto the deck. She rolled to her feet and back into their getaway boat, sparing a brief glance to make sure she'd sent the other boat on a course that wouldn't circle around on them. Even if it did, they'd be long gone by then.

Satisfied with her handiwork in getting rid of the second boat, she turned and shouted for Chuck. "Make it snappy, guys! Let's go!"

"We're a little busy!" Bryce shouted.

"Now or never!"

"Chuck's making a bomb!"

"He's what?"

Chuck heard them yelling about him and raised his head. "I'm almost done!"

"_Why_ are you making a bomb?" Sarah demanded.  
>"For the other boat!"<p>

Sarah shook her head in exasperation and pointed out the empty berth across from the boat she was occupying. "It's taken care of, come on!"

"But I was almost done..." Chuck said, dispiritedly as he finished attaching his wristwatch to the two pounds of C4. He'd already set the time and everything.

Bryce was close enough to hear and shrugged. "Leave it, we've gotta boat to catch." His old friend grabbed his shoulder and Chuck's thumb slipped. His watch beeped from it's position embedded in the block of C4 near the detonator.

"Oh crap..."

"Is that thing armed?"

"It's not _not_ armed."

"Come on!" Bryce slapped the explosives out of Chuck's hand and dragged him by the shirt out of the Jeep toward Sarah and the getaway boat.

The sound of distant gunfire brought Bryce to a stop, as he turned and sent return fire. Far away, Chuck heard a man scream in pain. Bryce was only a second behind Chuck into the boat. "Alright hit it!"

The sound of the engine struggling and failing to turn over brought everything into sudden focus. Sarah turned and grimaced. "About that... I think we should have taken the other boat."

Bryce winced and turned to Chuck. "How long until that bomb goes off?"

Sarah's eyes widened. Chuck shrugged. "Thirty seconds... ish."

"But we should be fine," she said. "It's far enough away we won't..."

Bryce held up his hand and waved it in the universal symbol of wishy-washyness. "With the Jeep's fuel tank in the mix? Anybody's guess, really," he said.

Sarah turned back to the controls. "Start you stupid son of a bitch!" She turned the key again and cursed when it didn't start a second time. She had to wait a couple seconds or risk flooding the engine. Sarah punched the seat next to her. Then she tried a different tactic; she leaned forward over the dash and stroked the weather-beaten wood panelling like a pet. "Please start this time? I'll love you forever and ever..." She'd done everything right, the boat was in perfect working order it was just... Murphy's law. Anything that could go wrong would go wrong. And so by the Jack Walker corollary: when everything went wrong, anything was worth trying. "Come on, please... I'll get you a nice new paint-job and everything. Maybe some flames, anything you want..." Sarah cooed to the engine and she turned the key again. Gently... oh so gently.

The marine diesel roared to life and she let out a whoop of triumph, practically standing on the throttle.

Their boat lurched suddenly into motion and Bryce clapped Chuck on the back happily, before turning and opening up again with his AK. Chuck joined in, for lack of anything better to do, but he wasn't really aiming so much as he was letting some of the tension bleed away. He stopped after ten rounds or so. And saw the extent of their pursuit for the first time.

Half a dozen men with AKs were taking cover behind the second Jeep Bryce had mentioned. The distance between them was a hundred yards or more and growing rapidly. Muzzle flares puncuated the sound of automatic fire. It wasn't very well aimed, but there was a lot of it.

"Sarah get down!" Chuck shouted, cramming himself down into the dubious safety of the passenger compartment.

Bullet impacts in the rear quarter of the boat, followed by splashes aft didn't exactly reassure him, but then, he wasn't dead. And the gunfire and the splashes trailed off after a moment.

"We made it," Chuck sighed, when Sarah turned and grinned at him, unhurt.

"Not yet we haven't," Bryce growled. Sarah's eyes widened suddenly, just as his shout ripped the air. "RPG! RPG! Hard right!"

Chuck spun and peeked his head over the side, watching the rocket-propelled grenade in horror. The boat lurched and tilted crazily as Sarah spun the wheel hard-over right. He lost his balance and nearly pitched out into the ocean before Bryce grabbed him around the waist and hauled him back down.

The RPG left an oddly lopsided corkscrew of a smoke trail behind it as it skimmed over the side of the boat and a hundred yards past them before it splashed harmlessly into the water.

Chuck gasped for breath. Behind them, on the dock, the man with the RPG was reloading. The odds of them dodging a second one of those probably weren't very good.

The RPG man shouldered his weapon and took aim. Bryce opened his mouth to shout warning to Sarah for more evasive action.

The C4 took the Jeep up in a fireball, shrapnel scything Rocket-launcher-man down just as he fired. The second RPG went wild, and hit the end of the dock before exploding.

Chuck's mouth moved without his conscious control. "Okay," he said. "_Now_we made it. Right?"

"Yeah," Bryce said. "Yeah, I think so."

"Good," Sarah said, turning to glare at him. "Now you want to explain what the _hell_is going on?"

Bryce grimaced. "It's classified."

Sarah's glare didn't think that was good enough. "I can always turn this boat around, Mister."

He shook his head. "No, I'm serious. Like above top secret. There's this whole long talk they give you when you start."  
>"At the CIA," it wasn't really a question from Chuck's lips, but he still needed the last bit of confirmation.<p>

He sighed. "Yes."

"I think we have a right to know."

"The CIA disagrees."

Chuck grimaced. "Okay how about this. I think we have a _need_to know. Sarah and I put our lives on the line to get that damn case and-"

Bryce rounded on Chuck, grinning at an unexpected turn. "You've got the case? That's great, that-"

"Here's the thing. Remember those pirates I told you about?"

"No..." Bryce groaned. "You let _pirates_ take it? In this day and age?"

"Wasn't much 'let' to it," Sarah said. "And we _did_ kill four of the bastards. If we're going to help get it back, we deserve to know why."

"You want to help get it back?" Bryce was taken aback.

Chuck was mulling that over as well. Strictly speaking, he could hop a plane back to Burbank and forget about everything. He could go back to his job, and just- He grimaced and shook his head. He couldn't just walk away. Sarah's boat, her livelihood, was at the bottom of the sea, and she had just told him how he was her boyfriend now. What kind of jerk would he be to just abandon her? But that was only part of it, and maybe not even the biggest part. He had fought for this, _killed_ more than once, and a large part of him was shouting to be heard over his more cowardly objections. Go home now and you'll never know what _any_ of this was about. You'll have killed two men, for no end other than your own survival. For some people that would be enough.

"No, Chuck said. He spotted Sarah's expression darken. "I don't want to help. I have to. But first, you owe us an explanation. And Bryce? Start from the top."

"The top?"

"Stanford."

Bryce grimaced. "Right," he said unenthusiastically. "The top."

Bryce was quiet long enough that Chuck turned to Sarah. "Okay, let's turn around and leave him for the pirates."

He shook his head. "They're not pirates, don't be ridiculous. They're... damn it. At this point, I should advise you that what I'm about to tell you falls under 18 United States Code section 793, and if you breathe a word of this to anyone, you'll be tried for treason and incarcerated for the rest of your natural life. Or executed if you get a cranky judge that day. Understand. This is serious business."

"Got it," Sarah said.

"You too, Chuck."

"Okay, loose lips sink ships. I know the deal."

"Right. So, from the top. Remember professor Fleming at Stanford? He was my first CIA contact. Pulled the strings to get us to that CIA camp summer of sophomore year."

"Wait, that was a _CIA_ camp?"

"Yeah, you didn't think they let you play around with that predator drone just cause you gave them the Bartowski eyebrow dance did you?" Sarah's jaw dropped and Chuck shrugged sheepishly. "Not important. The point is, he wanted to recruit you too, when your scores on that image retention test came back so high."

"That doesn't make any sense, Bryce. You didn't think maybe I'd want to join the CIA too?"

"It wasn't just the CIA." Bryce said. "I really shouldn't tell you this part, but... he wanted to try to upload data into your brain. I stole a look at his notes, and they were projecting a 30% chance it would turn you into a vegetable. I didn't trust them to let you make an informed decision."

"So you framed me for cheating?"

"It was the only thing I could think of at the time. But you caught me, and I was going to come clean about the whole thing when I stopped by after graduation, but..."

"But I confronted you about Jill and broke your nose."

"And the CIA didn't want somebody with that kind of instability in their pilot program. I figured it all worked out for the best."

Chuck glared at his former friend and shook his head. "This doesn't change anything. You should have let me make the choice myself, don't you think?"

"I'm sorry, alright? Is that what you want me to say? I'm sorry."

Chuck grunted. "It's a start. Now, what happened this week? Why send me those coordinates?"

"Chuck came before CIA in the autocorrect form on my satphone. I didn't have time to go back and hit the right contact. I figured you'd unlock the coordinates eventually."

"Wait, you had the Zork file ready to go?"

"It was my cover protocol on this mission. My communications were disguised in Zork files like we used to exchange at Stanford. I thought when you found those coordinates you'd give them to the police, and they'd eventually get flagged by CIA and they'd find the case in a couple of weeks," Bryce shook his head. "Why the hell aren't you back in Burbank? I never expected a damn rescue mission."

"Wait, then..." Sarah said. "They were taking you out to execute you."

"Exactly," Bryce said. "That was the plan. I feed them false intel until they get tired of torturing me and dump me in a shallow grave."

"That's not a good plan, Bryce. That's a _bad_ plan. Probably the worst plan I think I've ever heard," Chuck said. "And some of Sarah's plans involved blowing up boats with us still on them."

Sarah stuck out her tongue at him.

"I couldn't risk what's in that case falling into the wrong hands. It's _that_ important. But now pirates have the case," he shook his head at that development and tried to look for the silver lining. "At least they can't open it."

"You were willing to die over this?"

Bryce merely shrugged. "It's the job."

Chuck was speechless for a while. Then, he grimaced. "Why were you on a Roark Instruments flight? What's in that case that's so important?"

"The machine Fleming wanted to use to upload that crap into your head. It's almost finished. We contracted out all the components to different companies, RI was just one of many. Nobody really knows what any of the components are for, except Roark must have found out. The last piece of the machine is what's in the case. It's called the Cypher. His man on the flight from the fabrication plant tried to pull a gun on me. I killed him and the pilot, and radio-ed in a phony distress call, grabbed the case before I parachuted out."

"And the boat full of dead bodies?" Sarah asked.

"They were more Fulcrum goons -rogue spies- who came to pick me up a couple hours later. I over-powered one of them and shot the rest, then scuttled the boat. I left the case on the boat figuring they'd have backup on the way. They did, and the backup boat brought me to the island.

I sent the email just before I scuttled the boat. That was three days ago. When did you get to... the Philippines are closest, right?"

"Wait, wait. That would mean your plane didn't go down until... _after_ Roark sent me out here to find the plane crash."

"I thought he gave you the coordinates before you left?" Sarah said.

"No, that day it was just the specs on the R7. He didn't email me the coordinates of the plane crash until I was at the airport the next morning."

"Jesus," Sarah muttered. "Rogue spies? This just gets better and better."

"I think before I messed up their plans, they were going to land the plane back on the island and offload the cy- the case before making me disappear and crashing the plane to cover it up. There," Bryce said. "Mystery solved. Your turn. Explain about the pirates."

Chuck shrugged. "One of them was Sarah's ex. There's a whole big thing about money laundering involved."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "He wasn't my ex. He was _never_ my boyfriend."

"You and labels. I've known you four days and _I'm_ your boyfriend. You must've known him for months and-"

Sarah's eyes glittered. "He was never my _boyfriend__._" There was a subtle change in emphasis on it that Chuck didn't quite-oh. She blushed and turned back to steer, making sure they were heading on a proper course back to Manila harbor.

That put a damper on conversation, and when Bryce opened his mouth to demand more information, Chuck shook his head. Bryce darted his eyes at Sarah's back and nodded. The silence stretched out for hours until Sarah pulled the bullet-riddled but thankfully still mechanically-sound boat into the berth _Lisa__'__s__Revenge_ had occupied until a couple days earlier.

"Hey!" An elderly Filipino gent wearing only a pair of swim-turnks shouted from the dock. "You can't tie up here. Is reserved for the Walker Marine Salvage co- Miss Sarah! Where is the big boat?"

Sarah winced and tossed him one of the truncated lines. "Long story, Mr. Panganiban."

The old man gave Bryce and Chuck a quick once over, including a steely-eyed glare which Chuck figured was intended protectively. Chuck grinned. "That means she blew it up."

Mr. Panganiban blinked and looked to Sarah for confirmation. She glared at Chuck briefly and sighed and nodded to the dockmaster. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

He nodded sagely. "It always does," he said showing gold teeth in a grin. "I know from experience." Chuck looked at the man more closely, and recognized what might have been a bullet scar on the man's chest, white where the rest of him was dark.

Mr. Panganiban spotted the moment of recognition and his grin widened. "Careful you don't get one to match, eh?"

Chuck agreed fervently and the man walked off to check on something else in the marina. Bryce breathed sigh of relief. "You have someplace we can stash the guns? An apartment or something?"

She glared at Bryce. "I lived on the boat we sank trying to get away from the pirates who were after your sunken treasure. All I've got left is my Jeep."

"Good lord, not another Jeep," Bryce muttered.

"I'll take care of it," Chuck said. "I might as well take Roark for all my expense account is still good for before he gets popped for treason, right? We can buy some suitcases or something to hide the guns in, and Teddy can spring for a room for Bryce."

They had to clean out the back of Sarah's Jeep for Bryce to sit in, and by the time they had driven to a sporting goods store and back to load the guns and then all the way over to Chuck's hotel, Bryce was moving like he was nintey-seven instead of twenty-seven.

They went into the lobby seperately, with Bryce lagging behind to check in at Chuck's hotel under an assumed name, while Chuck and Sarah headed up to offload the guns. It was a little surreal being back in civilization, being jostled around by so many people, barely surviving Sarah's driving in the packed Manila streets. It was mid-afternoon. He had to check the clock-radio in his room for the time, after he had sacrificed his watch back on the island, only hours ago.

Sarah sat down on the bed and sighed happily. After a moment she scooted up to lie down.

Chuck sat next to her. "Okay," he said. "Now we need to have that talk."

She winced. "Really? Can't we just not think about it for a couple weeks and just _be__?"_

"We were in imminent danger of death back then," he said. "Now we're back in the world, we have to talk about where we go from here."

She rolled onto her side and curled her legs up, chin in her palm propped up on an elbow. "I need a shower. Can it wait until after?"

Chuck sighed. "I suppose so," he said and turned to grab the remote.

Sarah sat back up and frowned at his posture, leaning back to watch TV while she showered.

"God, how dense are you?"

"What?"

"Don't you need a shower too?" She arched an eyebrow pointedly.

"Oh," Chuck said and grinned sheepishly. "Um... yes. I guess I do."

Sarah shook her head and snorted. "You_ guess,_" she rolled her eyes and seized his wrist, dragging him after her toward the shower.

This time, one thing didn't lead to another. They _made love_, which was an unexpected development for both of them.

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

><p>AN: So, barring unforeseen story-bloat, we're down to only two chapters left. Yes. Two.

What ever you do, _don't _leave a review. (Maybe reverse psychology will work. Oh. I shouldn't have said that out loud. Or this. Damn, I'm bad at this.)


	14. Chapter 14

A/N: Feels weird not to have anything to yammer on about before I start a chapter.

* * *

><p>Chapter 14:<p>

"Oh, my god," Chuck groaned. "I never knew hot water could feel so good."

Sarah rolled her eyes and shifted in his arms to look up at him. It was a little awkward, and she had to move slowly so that she didn't slosh water out of the tub. "Seriously? We were only on the island for two days."

"Mmm," Chuck said, bending his head to plant his lips in the crevice formed by her neck and shoulder. "Except for the company, I don't think I'd have lasted that long."

Her shoulders shook briefly with laughter. "Somehow I doubt that. You did alright."

"Because I had you and your spear-gun there to supply me with fresh seafood," Chuck said.

"Okay, fair enough," she preened "I'm amazing. But still, the speargun wouldn't have gotten me _off_ that island. It was your technical know-how that saved the day."

"Alright," Chuck said grudgingly. "We're both amazing. This bubble bath is amazing. I bet the mini-bar is amazing. Your attempts at stalling are amazing. We should probably talk about... us... at some point. Where we go from here."

Sarah scrunched down into the water a little bit, crossing her arms and looking up at him with a touch of grumpiness in her eyes. She turned in his arms, making him suddenly aware of her body slick against his once more. "Hey, cut it out. We can do that again later. Talking now."

She sighed and rested her cheek on his shoulder, her arms going around his back. "I know, it's just... I know you're only here for a few more days before you've got to fly back to LA. Even if we manage to track down and retrieve this 'Cypher' or whatever, that isn't going to change is it?"

"Well, I doubt I'm going to have a job tomorrow to go back to," he said. "Either the CEO will be in jail, or he'll be... let's go with 'miffed' at me."

She snorted, trying not to laugh at his choice of words. "Yes, miffed is a good term for it. So, what are you thinking?"

"Well, that kind of depends on you, and how you would feel about me sticking around for a while. We barely know each other, when it comes right down to it."

"If Roark fires you, can you afford not to go back and look for work?"

Chuck nodded against the top of her head. "Yeah," he said. "I've got some money socked away. I'd intended to use it to finance my startup. But, I can dip into my savings. I think we owe it to ourselves not to mess things up trying the long distance thing unless we have to."

"I have to admit I'm not to thrilled about that prospect myself," Sarah said. "Would it be too stalker-y of me to suggest I go back to LA with you?"

"No, but I can't ask you to just pack up your life and move to LA. It wouldn't be fair to you."

She smirked, but it faded quickly into something else. "What life? Dad's probably halfway to Rio by now. With 'Lisa's Revenge' at the bottom of the South China Sea, Walker Marine Salvage is out of commission. I've got an emergency stash of 'run' money, and there's got to be dive schools I could teach at in LA in the longer term"

Chuck stroked her back gently. "I'm sorry we had to sink your boat and doom the company. I don't remember if I said it at the time. I probably didn't."

"I don't remember either. We had more immediate concerns at the time, like pirates."

"Yeah," Chuck said, and they fell into an easy silence.

"What are you thinking about?"

"What it'd be like if you came back to LA with me. Isn't the Armenian mob still after you?" Chuck said. "It wouldn't be safe."

"They're after 'Jenny Burton' not Sarah Walker. But, it isn't any safer here," Sarah reminded him. "The Philippine mob isn't going to be thrilled I killed Garret. I think his dad is like the number two guy in the organization."

"Oh. Then how are we going to get them to meet with us so Bryce can try to steal back the Cypher?"

Sarah shrugged and lay her head on his shoulder again, lost in thought. Chuck rubbed little circles on her back absently, trying to distract himself a little from how she felt pressed against him.

"Cut that out," Sarah said after a few minutes. "You're distracting me. And I think I've got the beginnings of a plan."

"Mind sharing it with me?" Chuck said. "I'm back to the whole positive-thinking-meteor thing."

Sarah rolled her eyes and laid out her thoughts.

"Wow. That's... it actually could solve most if not all of our problems. But Bryce is going to hate it. I love it."

She shook her head. "Still can't let the Stanford thing go? It sounds like he thought he was protecting you."

"Maybe so, but he if he was, he was protecting me the way you protect a child, not a friend," Chuck said. "Not someone you're supposed to respect. Its just... insulting that he'd try to take the choice from me like that. Still, I can't stay _that_ mad at him."

She quirked an eyebrow, "Why not?"

"If I'd joined the CIA with Bryce straight out of Stanford, _we_ probably never would have met."

"Hmm," Sarah said thoughtfully. "Probably not. Maybe we owe him a gift basket or something. Let's talk about something else."

"Like what?"

Sarah pushed herself up with both hands on his chest, water cascading off her curves as she angled her torso up out of the water and straddled him.

"Oh," Chuck said. "Never let it be said you aren't a master of the segue."

Sarah gave him a long lingering kiss on the mouth, only to pull away far too soon at a knock on the door.

"Dammit. Great timing, room service guy," she grumbled with a roll of her eyes.

"When did you have time to order room service?" Chuck said a touch breathlessly. "You haven't been out of my sight in like three days."

"You were at the front desk getting me a key to your room, I flagged down a bellboy," Sarah said. The knock repeated itself, and Sarah started clambering out of the tub. "Come on."

"In a minute," Chuck said. The sight of Sarah dripping wet and sudsy from the bathwater had an inevitable effect on him, "I'll be out in a minute."

Sarah arched an eyebrow as she rubbed a towel over her body, glanced back and spotted the trouble right away. She grinned crookedly. Chuck sank lower in the water.

"Where's your expense card?"

"Wherever my shorts ended up," Chuck said. "Check the pile."

The wicked gleam in her eye should have warned him, but he was still shocked when she turned and bent to scoop up his discarded clothes, wagging her backside unnecessarily as she did so.

Chuck growled under his breath and splashed his way out of the tub. "You're in for it now," he said.

Sarah grinned and flipped the damp towel over his face, before ducking away laughing." By the time he recovered his balance and got the towel off his head, Sarah had slipped into one of the white cotton bathrobes the hotel had provided. She tied the sash with a flourish and tossed him the second robe, then slipped out of the bathroom. Chuck wrapped the towel around his waist and shrugged into the bathrobe. He came out of the bathroom and stopped dead.

His eyes widened when he saw what was waiting for him. there was a line of room service carts pouring into the room, four already, and more in a traffic jam behind them, trailing out into the corridor. He glared accusingly at her, "What did you do? Order one of _everything__?_"

Sarah shrugged. No use denying it. "Yup," she said, and waved the little leather book with the check in it at one of the men. "Where does he sign?"

Chuck strode forward and signed the room service bill, ushering the gang of servers out and shutting the door. He breathed a sigh and leaned back against the door he shook his head at the spectacle. They could practically open a buffet out of his hotel room at this point. "Do we really need to keep racking up charges on my expense account like that?"

Sarah nodded, "Yes, in case Roark has goons keeping tabs on you. Hopefully the don't think it's odd you didn't buy anything for two days. Now sit on the bed, I want to lie on your chest and feed you grapes."

"I can't always tell if you're joking or not."

Her grin widened. "And I love that about you," Sarah said while she checked a couple of platters. "Now where's my lasagna, chicken-fried steak and apple pie?"

"Really?"

"Oh, fruit platter!" She said, popping a grape in her mouth. Chuck pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. A few seconds later, Sarah brought the fruit platter over and plopped herself down in his lap.

"I guess you weren't joking."

She grinned and stopped him from talking any more.

Sarah had only managed to feed him a handful of grapes and a single messy strawberry, which cleaning up had become a rather involved process, before the room phone rang on the bedside table. Chuck stretched and tried to reach it, but Sarah occupying his lap reduced his reach. "You mind getting up so I can answer that?"

"Yes, I do mind," Sarah said. "Best seat in the house, I'm not giving it up so easy." But after another couple of rings, she tried to stretched for the phone herself, letting her bathrobe fall half-open, and eliciting a groan from Chuck.

"You're doing that on purpose."

She shook her head and got up, took the two steps to the phone, picked the whole thing up, and resumed her perch in his lap before answering the phone. "Chuck's room," she said, and immediately held the receiver out at arms length. Even from that distance, he recognized Ellie's voice.

"Oh, crap," Chuck breathed. "Quick gimme the phone!"

He took the handset and grimaced. This wasn't going to go well. "Ellie, it's me. Ellie, calm down. Ellie!"

"Chuck! You're alive! Why aren't you answering your cellphone?"

Sarah's perch on his lap was close enough for Sarah to hear. "My fault, Ellie," she said, mouthing for Chuck to play along. "I dropped Chuck's phone off the boat so he'd stop taking work calls."

"I thought it was waterproof?"

"It is," Chuck said.

"But I dropped it in a hundred feet of water, and refused to get out the scuba tanks until we left."

"What?" Ellie said."Left what?"

"I took your advice, Ellie," Sarah explained.

"Advice?"

"Not to let the nerdity drive me off. We've been all but connected at the... hip for days."

Chuck blushed furiously and stole the phone back. "Sorry about that, I didn't-" He frowned at the handset. "Did she hang up?"

Sarah waved the base of the phone, where her finger was holding down the disconnect switch. "She knows I'm here, she'll figure the rest out."

"Rest of what?" Chuck said.

"Do I need to walk you through it again?"

She shifted around on his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him into silence. When the phone rang again a few minutes later, neither of them was in a position to answer it.

* * *

><p>Bryce hammered on the door to Chuck's hotel room, "Come on," he grumbled, "Answer the door!" It took another minute at least before the door swung open.<p>

"Hey, Bryce," Chuck said, appearing in the cracked doorway looking distinctly... rumpled.

"Why didn't you answer the phone? I've got news."

"We were busy," Sarah said from deeper in the room.

Bryce smirked. "Well, keep it in your pants from now on, we need to get planning."

"Okay, let me put some pants _on_ first," Chuck said, shutting the door in Larkin's face.

When Chuck let Bryce in a couple minutes later, he stared at the massive spread of food. "Did you open a buffet or something?"

"Its all on the Roark Instruments tab," Sarah explained airily. "Help yourself."

Bryce frowned at Sarah, still in her bathrobe. "Roark's plane landed twenty minutes ago, my contact in the company made the trip too. He's stopping by in a few mintues to give us the particulars, but it looks like the pirates- or are we calling them mobsters now that we're back on land- are meeting Roark to make the sale sometime tonight." He shook his head at Sarah's bathrobe. "Shouldn't you get dressed?"

Sarah took a bite of her steak with an odd viciousness, and Chuck cleared his throat. "Um, yeah. About that? All her clothes were on the boat that we had to sink. You know, to get away from the guys after your precious doo-dad? She's only got a bikini and the wetsuit that I had to cut the sleeves off so we could come rescue you back on the island. We're going to need to go shopping real quick."

"Why are you telling me this instead of her?"

"She blames you for destroying her entire wardrobe," Chuck said. Sarah gestured with her steak knife emphatically. "So, I'm acting as intermediary."

"She seemed fine a minute ago."

"I was trying to be civil, assface," Sarah growled while cutting another piece of steak a little more strenuously than strictly necessary. Chuck shrugged helplessly.

Bryce sighed and grabbed a carrot-stick from one of the platters of finger foods. "So," he said, crunching away briefly before going on, "You look like you've got a plan, Chuck."

"Actually..." Chuck said. "It's mostly Sarah's plan."

"It's... well I was going to say 'It's simple really,'" she said and put down her knife and fork. "But it's actually kind of complicated now that I think about it."

Bryce rolled his eyes and nodded for her to go on as he perused the food selection. Eventually he came away with a quesadilla platter.

"Well," she said. "It's like this. The local mob has stolen this cyber thing.

"Cypher."

"Potato potahto. Anyway," she went on. "They're going to have to try to sell it to somebody, but currently, it's still inside that special secure case. Chuck called it a Roark 600 or something?"

"Yes," Bryce said. "Unless they've got a guy on the payroll with genius IQ and a couple weeks, they won't be able to get into that thing without destroying the Cypher."

"Which would take care of your problem,"Chuck said. "Except that I kind of mentioned that to them when they were holding us hostage back on Sarah's boat, so we can't count on a bungled attempt to break into the case to keep the Cypher from falling into Roark's hands. And it's more like a couple of hours. Not weeks."

Sarah glared at Bryce pointedly for a moment before she went on. As far as she was concerned Bryce was at fault for this whole situation, so the boat was down to him as well. Even though it had been her idea. Chuck never claimed to understand women. "So, I figured they might try to sell it back to Roark. Now they don't know that what's in there is worth so much... how much is it worth anyway?"

"Three billion, give or take a few million."

Sarah let out a low whistle. "Okay, so Roark will have low-balled them with an offer of a couple million, you think?"

"We can call and tell them how much it's really worth," Chuck said. "And offer to open the case for them."

"But instead we steal it back."

"Oh, just like that. Steal it back," Bryce said. "You two do much stealing from the mob? It tends to go poorly."

"I happen to have a little experience in that regard. We can make this work. They haven't seen what's in the case. One circuit board's the same as the next as far as they're concerned. We open the case, and switch out the cypher with a phony. How big is the thing?

"Maybe a little bigger than a silver dollar."

"Perfect. So you pocket the Cypher, plant a phony circuit board. Then book it out of there before Roark shows up and figures out something is wrong."

"This is all sounding plausible. But, wait. What's this 'me' stuff. It was 'we' a second ago."

"Well, yeah. You're the bait in this scenario."

"You're kidding. You want to turn me over to the mob?"

"The case is keyed to your thumbprint and voice ID, right?"

"I never told you that..."

"It was the safe assumption. You were escorting the thing."

"But that doesn't mean I can open the case."

"Bryce," Chuck said. "Can you open the case?"

"Of course," he said. "But you still shouldn't have assumed it."

"Ugh," Sarah groaned. "You two are like children."

A knock came at the door followed by a gruff voice. "Larkin, you in there?"

Bryce shot to his feet and went to the door, gun in hand. Chuck blinked. When had he gotten a pistol? Maybe it was just one of those things they taught you at the CIA: how to magically find guns in a foreign country. "Code in," he said while peering through the peephole.

"Come on, the hallway's deserted, CIA," the voice said impatiently through the door. "And you know my face. You can see me giving you the two-finger salute through the peep-hole. Quit being a jerk and let me in."

"Code in."

"Merman."

"Okay," Bryce said, and opened the door.

"Christ on a crutch, Larkin. Why the hell are there a couple of civilians in here?"

"Wait, aren't you Roark's secre- executive assistant?"

He grunted acknowledgment. "Major John Casey, NSA."

"Huh. This is all starting to make a weird kind of sense," Chuck said. "You must have been under cover at Roark Instruments?"

"Still am," Casey said. "Which brings us back to the other thing. Larkin, what's Bartowski doing here?"

"I can speak for myself. _We_ rescued _him_ from some bad guys on a deserted island, after pirates stole the Cypher from us," Chuck said. "It's a whole thing."

"I've read them in, a little," Bryce said.

"Oh, perfect," Casey rolled his eyes. "And now, what, you're bringing them along on the OP?"

"Actually, we're helping to plan-"

Casey bristled and fixed Bryce with a glare. "Outside, Larkin. We need to talk."

Bryce followed Casey out and left Chuck and Sarah in a confused silence. "So, what's that about? You know this Casey guy?"

Chuck shrugged. "He's the guy who gave me the info about the plane in the first place, but he was undercover, I guess, as the CEO's secretary."

"He didn't look happy to see you."

"I think he's only got the one facial expression."

Bryce and Casey came back after a minute or so. "Okay, Bartowski, let's hear this plan."

"Do I need to start from the beginning again? This is getting ridiculous."

"Just talk, Bartowski."

"Fine. We turn Bryce over to the mob guys who stole the Cypher, he opens the case and switches it out for a fake we rig up. Then we stage some kind of distraction so he can get away."

"Oh," Casey said. "That's actually not a bad plan. To start from. They'll probably want to keep you around until after their meeting with Roark. From the way he's talking, I'm guessing it's set for some time tonight. We can take everybody down and take back the Cypher at the meeting tonight... Yeah, that could work..."

"Wait!" Bryce said. "You're going along with this?"

"My interest is piqued. How were you going to deal with their muscle when the... mobsters was it? When they inevitably double-cross you?"

"We've got a couple AKs in the closet," Chuck said weakly.

"Definitely won't be enough," Casey said and shook his head, but then a grin found its way onto his face. So he didn't have just the one expression after all.  
>"You'll need sniper support. Luckily, I know a guy," he grinned and headed toward the food. "You got any barbeque?"<p>

"Third platter from the left," Chuck said.

Sarah made the call, which took a fair bit of time on it's own. The man they needed to talk to wasn't exactly in the yellow pages under 'mobster.' Further compounding the diffulties was the tendency of every person they got on the phone to deny any involvement with any illegal activity and promptly hang up. In any of three languages. Luckily Sarah's Spanish and Tagolog were up to the task.

It was Casey who eventually suggested she speak in an easily breakable code, and then things began falling into place. Sarah worked her way up the ladder of lower level mobsters whose names she _could _find in the phone book, until she had Garret's father on the phone. "Yes," the mob boss's voice came out of the speaker-phone in Chuck's room.

"This is the woman who killed your son," she said without any preamble. Bryce and Casey glared at her, but couldn't risk saying anything that their mark might hear. "Call me back at this number on a line you know is secure," she gave the man the number of a brand new pre-paid cell they'd sent Casey out for. While they waited for a return call, Casey and Bryce demanded answers.

"It's... complicated," Sarah said. "I know what I'm doing. Sort of."

The two experience intelligence officers didn't have time to alter the plan before Sarah's cellphone rang. She put him on speakerphone again.

"I didn't think you'd call back so quickly." The voice on the other end of the phone was slow in answering.

"He's dead, then. My men weren't willing to make that leap in logic. Claimed that you and the young man were quite dead however. I'd be interested in knowing how he died."

"You're awfully calm," Sarah said, feeling anything but calm herself.

"I've come to appreciate the value of good phone manners. And if the police do have my other phone tapped, you just confessed to murder."

"Self defense, Mr. Conway," she said. "No jury in the world would convict me."

"Well," the man said. "There is that. I assume there's a reason for this call, other than to inform me of the particulars of my son's death. There was no love lost between us, you should know. I'm sure he was going to try to have me killed some time soon."

"Garret's men took a case from my boat."

"And now you want it back? I don't think so."

"Hardly. They stole it fair and square. But we can still be of help to you. What's in that case is worth enough for both of us to get what we want."

"Of course, and what exactly is it that _you_ want?"

"Get the Armenians off my dad's back. Don't come after me for Garret. And two million in US currency."

He laughed.

"It's less than one percent of what you stand to make on the deal," Sarah said. They could practically hear the man sitting up straighter in his chair.

"Explain."

"I have it on good authority that the contents of that case are worth upwards of three billion dollar. 'B' as in butt-load of money, Mr. Conway."

"I'm asking myself what you stand to gain by lying to me. And I can't really think of anything. The case can't be broken into for us to check. I already have a buyer lined up. He offered a million, _I_ asked for two. Changing the terms now would be bad business."

"He'll pay at least two hundred fifty million, Mr. Conway. I can have the CIA agent who was escorting the case to collaborate all this."

Conway laughed again. "Truly. It would almost have to be. This story of yours. It is too crazy to be a lie. Alright. You have a deal. The meeting with the buyer is in four hours," he listed the address. "Be there in two hours. And if you are lying, we'll have another discussion." The way he said it sent a chill down Sarah's spine, even without an overt threat behind it.

"You killed his _son__?"_ Casey demanded. "You didn't think that was worth mentioning before you made the call?"

"You wouldn't have let me make the call otherwise."

Casey shook his head, fuming. "Did you know about this, Larkin?"

"No," Bryce said. "Of course not. I've been against this plan from the start. There's no way he'll go through with the deal."

"I know," Sarah said. "My dad had a saying: 'When all else fails, bluff your ass off.'"

"How'd that work out for him," Casey said sourly.

"Not great," Sarah admitted. "But he's smart enough to have skipped town after Garret and his boys roughed him up. While we're still here."

"You have a better plan?" Chuck asked.

Casey growled. "I wish to god I did."

* * *

><p>"I still can't believe you're using <em>me<em> as bait," Bryce complained in the van Chuck had rented on his expense account. The way Roark was conspiring at his own downfall hadn't stopped being hilarious yet. "I want it on the record that I officially hate this plan."  
>"Noted," Casey said, before yanking the black hood down over Bryce's head.<p>

"Cuffs aren't too tight I hope?" Sarah said, giving them a tweak just to be sure. Bryce grunted in discomfort, and Sarah grinned. She was still blaming Bryce for the loss of her wardrobe. Since they'd had to make her shopping trip exceedingly short, she had only managed to turn up a 'Where's the Beef' t-shirt and a pair of acid-wash jeans. Chuck's insistence that it was 'a good look for her' hadn't done much to improve her mood toward Bryce.

Bryce growled something indistinct under his hood.

"Okay," Casey said. "Enough tormenting Larkin." He held out a plastic case holding a pair of tiny earpieces. "Put these in, you two."

"Okay," Chuck said. He paused to inspect the tiny electronic gizmo until Casey growled softly. "Sorry, geez."

"Comm check," Casey said.

"Oh, wow," Chuck said. "What's the range on these things?"

"Couple blocks, that's it. And the battery only lasts about three hours. Matching watches. This button here, starts recording. This one shuts off the transmitter in case they sweep for bugs, it'll shut down the earpieces too. Then push again to turn them back on."

"Why would they sweep for bugs?"

Casey grunted. "I don't know. It's the _smart_ thing to do? You don't get very far assuming your enemies are stupid. Spy rule number 1: Assume they're at least as smart as you."

"Oh," Chuck said, suitably chastised.

"Okay," Casey said. "I'll stay in radio contact while this goes down. If anything goes wrong, the code word is... I don't know, something innocuous."

"Pineapple?"

Casey rolled his eyes. "Sure, why not. Say 'pineapple,' and I start taking people out." He patted the bulky case holding his sniper rifle. "That'll be your cue to try and grab the Cypher and leg it out of there. Anyway, I'll have you in sight from my perch."

"Which is where, by the way?"

"Rafters of the warehouse," he explained. "Your meeting is in an hour and a half, Roark's is in three and a half. Which is why I'll be setting up right now."

"Oh. Assuming they're as smart as us, won't they have people watching the place already?"

"Yes. But I'm very sneaky."

"For a huge guy with a giant sniper rifle; what is that a .50 cal?"

"I'm sneaky for _anybody_," Casey said. "And yes. You've got a good eye for firearms. Might be hope for you yet."

"If we're going to be waiting in here for another hour and a half, why am I already wearing the damn hood," Bryce said. He had to over-enunciate everything to be understood and it gave an odd cadence to his words.

"That's in case Conway or his goons spot you lurking around in the van. The hood stays on."

"This is worse than the island," Bryce grumbled. Casey laughed and headed out into the late afternoon.

"How'd you know about the gun?" Sarah asked.

"Call of Duty. Don't tell Casey?"

"My lips are sealed."

Chuck and Sarah drove a block away and parked the van once more, listening to Casey's whispered status reports as he made his way to his sniper's nest. "Two armed guards in a sedan at the more inside the warehouse, so far. No problems." It was a very quiet, nerve wracking hour in the van. Chuck and Sarah were precluded from really talking by Bryce, even though he was hooded and cuffed. They listened to a local radio station until Casey told them to shut it off, as the sound was being fed through to him, and he wanted to stay radio silent as much as possible. Chuck didn't know enough about the earpieces to risk turning them off and back on later.

About thirty minutes before their scheduled meeting with the mobsters holding the Cypher, Casey's voice sounded in their ears. "Two SUV's just pulled up. Looks like this is it."

"You can see that from up there?"

"There's this new invention called a window, numbnuts? Eight men," Casey went on. "Looks like four with sub-machineguns, two with pump action shotguns. Last two, I can't tell, getting some glare from the sunset. Probably just pistols. Must be Conway and a second in command. Too many shadows in here, still can't make out any faces. Give it another twenty minutes before you roll in."

"Seriously?" Chuck said. He tried to keep the plaintive note out of his voice. "This is taking forever."

"All good things to those who wait, Bartowski."

The twenty minutes Casey demanded seemed to take days, until finally, Casey's voice came through again. "Okay, head on in."

Chuck shivered and glanced at Sarah. "You want to back out, there's still time. Rio is nice this time of year, or so I'm told."

Sarah shook her head. "It's my plan, more or less. I want to see this through as much as you do."

"Okay," he said, and put the van into gear.

The two outside guards waved them to a stop. One stood a ways back, covering the other in case Chuck or Sarah started shooting. Chuck rolled his window down. "We're here to see Conway."

"We'll need to search you for weapons before you go inside."

"No need," Chuck said. "We've got AKs. They'll be pretty obvious."

"What?" He took a handful of steps back, hand going to his hip.

Sarah shouted something in Tagalog, and the guard paused, then nodded. He pulled out a cellphone, and after a brief consultation with his boss, nodded again.

"Okay. But you move slow."

Chuck went in back and guided Bryce down out of the back, then followed, AK slung slanting down his chest, while Sarah kept hers out and trained at Bryce's back.

The two outside guards watched the procession carefully. They obviously didn't trust anyone with automatic weapons. It wasn't a bad policy, Chuck thought, just on general principles.

One of the mobsters turned away, reluctance obvious in the set of his shoulders, and opened the door.

He led them into the warehouse, through a relative labyrinth of shipping containers and pallets of miscellaneous, probably ill-gotten, goods. This was probably even their own warehouse. Chuck imagined them 'whacking' people and fitting them for their cement shoes in this very building and shivered, trying to halt his overactive imagination.

"Lose the hood," one of the men said. He was asian, older with gray-tinged sideburns and a calm voice Chuck remembered as belonging to Conway. He was vaguely confused for a moment, and then wondered if that was racist of him, expecting a white man. Garret hadn't been overtly asian-looking, and now he was becoming exceedingly worried about it, enough so that he almost said something. He thought better of making a potential faux-pas and remained silent. Bad way to start a covert meeting.

Sarah tugged the hood off Bryce's head.

"Had to rough him up a little?" Conway said. "I should pay you less for damaging the merchandise."

"He can still open the case. Then you can set your own price with your buyer. You did bring the case, didn't you?"

"Of course," Conway waved to one of his men, who produced the distinctive silver case. "I wasn't expecting the armament, however. Care to explain before we proceed?"

"Like I'm going to walk in here _un_armed? What's to have stopped you from just killing us?"

"And you think your guns make you safe?"

"You're barely thirty feet away," Chuck said. "that's not exactly a difficult shot. But hopefully nobody came here for a blood bath. I know I didn't. Our friend here opens the case, you get your leverage, make a little phone call to LA, we get our money and walk. And he walks with us."

Conway frowned. "Why do you care what happens to him?"

"CIA pays good money for a 'rescued' agent."

"Ah, greed. Is that all that motivates you I wonder? I have a special guest of my own."

One of Conway's men pushed forward the second man Casey had spotted without an obvious weapon. He was wearing a hood very similar to Bryce's, and his hands were bound in front of him. Chuck felt a chill go down his spine. "Oh, crap," he breathed, just as the hood was pulled off to reveal the familiar features of Jack Walker.

"Sorry, kiddo," Jack said as the goon behind him pressed the shotgun into his back.

TO BE CONCLUDED...

* * *

><p>AN: Will try to get the final chapter out before Thanksgiving. Constructive criticism is welcome in the reviews as always. Perhaps moreso because I'm not too fond of how this chapter turned out myself. Of course positive reviews are welcome too. Don't feel pressured to badmouth me if you don't feel like it. That would be crazy-talk.


	15. Chapter 15

A/N: I said I'd post this chapter before Thanksgiving. See how I follow through on things. That's right. Barely.

* * *

><p>Chapter 15:<p>

"Are you okay, dad?" Sarah said.

"I'm fine. They caught me in the airport parking lot. Must be losing my touch in my golden years." he grunted and shut up at a blow to the ribs.

Sarah tensed, and fought down the instinct to shoulder her AK. Escalation seemed like a bad plan when outnumbered two to one. "You hurt him and I'll-"

"Please, no histrionics," Conway said with a wave of his hand. "We're going to have a new deal now, and I will dictate the terms."

Even as he finished speaking, the lights went out, dropping the whole gathering into darkness but for the thin light coming in the windows on the upper story. The sun had set while Chuck and Sarah were led inside, and what little light remained was fading fast.

"Nice job with the lights, Major," Chuck said under his breath just as a laser dot appeared on Conway's chest. "You might want to reconsider that," Chuck said, pointing. "That's the laser dot from a sniper scope."

"What the hell are you talking about, Bartowski?" Casey's voice said through the earpiece. "I don't have a laser sight."

"Wha-" Chuck said, looking down to his own chest. There was a dot there as well. "Oh, crap." Each of Conway's men had a similar dot in the middle of their chest, as did Sarah, but not Jack or Bryce. The man behind Jack had a laser dot on his forehead instead of his chest.

"Well," Conway mused. "This certainly makes things interesting."

"My thoughts exactly," came a new voice from the shadows. Chuck recognized the voice and grimaced.

"You're early," he said.

"My, am I, Mr. Bartowski? It seems you're here entirely uninvited."

Conway frowned. "You know this guy?"

"Oh, we haven't been formally introduced; just our minions," the newcomer said, standing there in his hawaiian shirt and bermuda shorts, with a hand-held electric lantern illuminating his features. "Theodore Roark, Teddy to my friends. Quite a few of whom are in attendance out there, to keep everyone honest. If you try to raise your weapons they have orders to shoot."

"You picking this up, Casey," Chuck whispered.

"Yeah, just switched to nightvision. It's not as bad as it seems. Five guys, with laser sights on their guns, and handheld laser pointers. In the dark, it's a decent force multiplier."

"That in mind, my good man," Roark went on. "I'll be taking that case please, Mr. Conway."

"I don't think that's a great idea Teddy," Bryce said.

"Oh, Mr. Larkin. I'd heard you survived your little trip to the base. Pity the rumors are true."

"How'd you know?" Chuck said.

Roark gave the room a thin smile. "You rented a van on the expense account. I had the account flagged for odd expenditures, after a man matching your description shot his way off the island. Seeing you here with Mr. Larkin confirms my suspicions. I merely had the car company activate the GPS lo-jack system, and saw that you were coming here. I admit we had to scramble to arrive just as you were bringing in Mr. Larkin for this get-together. I must say, Charles- do you mind if I call you Charles? I must say, I didn't think you had the stones to try something like this. Live and learn. Well, I will anyway."

Roark hefted the case holding the Cypher. "It's about time I skedaddled, lady and gentlemen. You've been a lovely audience."

"Teddy," Chuck said. "Maybe we can just sit down and talk about this. Maybe over a slice of pizza. You like Pineapple?"

Roark shook his head and opened his mouth to reply, but Bryce was already moving. His trick cuffs came undone at a flick of his wrist, and he made a pistol appear in his hand as if by magic. The guards hadn't bothered to search the 'prisoner'. Chaos erupted.

There was a huge roar from above them, which Chuck recognized as the report of Casey's sniper rifle an instant before the head of the man behind Jack disappeared in a red cloud. Jack stumbled forward in a sprawl and stayed down, eyes darting around in shock.

Conway and his remaining gunmen mostly turned to engage Roark's hidden goons. Two started to fire on Chuck and Sarah, but Bryce beat them to the trigger, sending both men spinning to the ground with bullets in their chests. At that point, the whole thing became a horrible unmanageable melee of gunfire lighting up the darkened warehouse sporadically. The noise made communication all but impossible.

Chuck and Sarah fired wildly, adding to the din, but then Sarah raced forward instead of toward cover. Chuck cursed under his breath and followed. They took up station over Sarah's father, and Sarah took her diving knife to the plastic zip-tie binding his wrists.

It was the longest four seconds of Chuck's life, staring out into the warehouse, lit only erratically by bursts of gunfire. Chuck caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A man in black combat fatigues resolved out of the darkness, backlit by gunfire and heading their way, gun up and the laser nearly blinding Chuck. That wasn't good, a tiny detached part of his brain said; it meant the gun's barrel was pointed directly at his eyeballs. He turned, trying to whip his bulky assault rifle around in time.

The charging gunman jerked and spun to the ground in a cloud of blood, blackish in the brief darkness between muzzle flares. The thunder of Casey's sniper rifle came at the same instant.

"I owe you one, Casey," Chuck breathed.

"Taking fire, that second shot gave away my location. You're on your own for a while."

"Sarah," Chuck said.

"I heard," she said. "Come on, dad we've got to get you to cover."

"Give me a gun," Jack said. "I can fight."

Chuck grunted and retrieved the dead man's shotgun, tossing it to Jack. The gunfire kept on in the warehouse around them.

"You sure there's only five of them, Casey?" Chuck whispered, when they found a spot that seemed promising. A pair of shelving units packed with boxes made a T-shape, and a few feet down was a pallet full of TV boxes, screening them from much of the warehouse.

"Five to start," Casey said. "More now. Probably had a team on overwatch at the doors."

"Crap. I'm hit," Bryce said over his own earpiece. Chuck had nearly forgotten about him, somehow, in the conflagration. "Chuck, you've got a guy coming in, from three o'clock."

Chuck turned instinctively and squeezed off a three round burst at an indistinct shape that crumpled to the ground. "How the hell did you see him?"

A light appeared in the darkness, to one side of where the man Chuck had shot lay still. It disappeared and reappeared, and after a moment, Chuck recognized it as the illuminated dial of Bryce's wristwatch. "Got you," Chuck said. "I'm coming to you."

"Be careful," Sarah hissed, and Chuck pulled her in for a brief kiss.

Jack arched an eyebrow. "When did that start happening?"

"Now isn't the time for the overprotective dad shtick," Sarah said.

"Might ne my only chance!" Jack retorted, popping out of cover to loose a shotgun blast.

"Desert island," Sarah shrugged one shoulder. "One thing led to another."

Chuck kept low, moving in a crouch and peering in the direction of flashes as he went, but the firefight was moving away from them into the far reaches of the warehouse. He was scared out of his mind, but somehow he kept putting one foot in front of the other. Finally he knelt over Bryce, who was leaning against a metal shipping container. "How bad is it?"

"My leg," he said. "Can't walk, but I'll live. Shit! Get down!"

Chuck spun as he toppled to one side, finger instinctively squeezing the trigger. Bryce's pistol barked once, taking a gunman in the chest. Chuck sprayed half a dozen rounds downrange before his AK clicked on an empty chamber. He wasn't sure if any of those shots had come anywhere near the target.

"I'm out," Chuck said, leaning against the shipping container next to Bryce.

"Well that's just great," Bryce sighed.

"Roark's getting away with the Cypher," Casey said over their earphones. "I don't have a clear shot at him."

"Like hell he is," Chuck growled. "Gimme your gun, Bryce. Casey, cover me."

"South door," Casey said, "Back the way you came in, once you're outside you're on your own."

"You don't have to do this," Bryce said, reluctantly parting with his firearm, and a spare magazine, which he'd scrounged up from somewhere.

"I don't like to lose," Chuck said, echoing Sarah from earlier in the day, and suddenly realizing the truth of it. He didn't like to lose either. It was that same drive that had led him to succeed at Stanford, to work himself to the bone at Roark Instruments, not taking a day of vacation in the last four years. Maybe that was why it had hit him so hard when Jill had claimed to be running off with Bryce. It wasn't _just_the seeming double-betrayal. He'd always felt a little jealous of Bryce for his track and field successes, even if he hadn't allowed himself to dwell on it. Had he been afraid all along Jill would come to her senses and 'trade up?' Could that be coloring his thinking even now, spurring him to chase down the bad guy when Bryce couldn't? It was an odd time to be dealing with epiphanies, and Chuck tried to shrug the moment away. He'd get himself killed if he let those kind of thoughts in right now. "Stay down, Bryce," Chuck said.

Then he was running for the doors after a fleeing Teddy Roark. His hands moved as he made his way from cover to cover, memories coming back from that summer learning small unit tactics, the smells and the sounds. He was running on autopilot now, finding and thumbing the magazine release on the pistol, catching the falling mag and replacing the partially expended magazine with the spare Bryce had slipped him. He wanted a full clip in case there were still more gunmen outside. He kept the other mag in his free hand in case he needed to reload.

His heart hammered in his throat as he approached the door, and spotted Roark slipping out. The case trailed behind him, glinting in the dim interior of the warehouse. Chuck's focus narrowed down to the doorway he needed to go through and his legs pumped, his lungs burned.

A gunman rose up out of the darkness, and fell away with a sniper rifle bullet through him, and then Chuck hit the door with his shoulder, and stumbled out into the street.

He glanced around for some sign of Roark, and saw the man at the open door of a black sedan parked some way off. Teddy's head turned at the sound of the door cracking open against the side of the warehouse, and a moment later he turned fully, bringing a revolver to bear. Chuck still had some forward momentum from his headlong sprint out of the warehouse, and he turned the stumble back into a run. He rolled and came up to his knees with his back to the wheel-well of his rented van.

Roark squeezed off a couple of shots, both hitting the van with metallic 'wham' sounds. Chuck heard the engine of the sedan rev and found his way to his feet, spinning into a firing stance with his elbows resting on the hood of his van.

Chuck fired several times, all into the windshield about where the driver's head should be, but the sedan came on regardless. Roark must have been hiding down behind the dash. The sedan was aimed to hit the van broadside, and Chuck came out from behind cover to change his point of aim. He fired another handful of shots, blowing out the front tire of Roark's getaway car. The car went out of control, swerving away and flipping onto two wheels. Chuck kept shooting, almost instinctively, until the gun clicked empty. Roark's out of control getaway car careened past him; it missed the van in a shower of sparks as it skidded by, until it came to a deceptively gentle stop a few yards from the exterior wall of the warehouse.

Chuck caught his breath and walked carefully toward the black sedan. He reloaded as he went, just pausing long enough to check and see how many rounds he had left. Five Shots.

"Teddy," Chuck said. "Throw out the gun, and I'll try and get you out of there. There was no answer. "Mr. Roark, are you alive in there?"

Chuck was only a few steps away when the metal let out a squeal, and the car teetered briefly before ot flopped back onto four wheels with a crash and squeal of protesting metal. One of the remaining tires popped from the impact and already-fractured windows let go entirely in a crunch and tinkle of broken glass. Chuck took one more step toward the vehicle and ducked his head to look into the passenger compartment, expecting the worst.

It was empty. Chuck blinked and leaned over further, at a loss. There was a brick down by the pedals, almost as if someone had wedged the gas down... "Hell," Chuck said, as the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He spotted a figure behind him in his reflection in the miraculously unbroken side view mirror.

"Hands up. Do it now, or I'll kill you where you stand."

"What now, Teddy," Chuck said once he'd complied.

"I'm going to need the keys to your van, Charles."

"Of course you are."

"And no sudden moves please."

"Whatever you say," Chuck grumbled. In the mirror, he could make out surprisingly tiny details. He concentrated on that as he dug in his jeans with one hand. Chuck squinted, and it looked like the hammer was down on Roark's revolver. It didn't necessarily mean much, but it was maybe an extra split second to react before Teddy Roark could shoot him in the back. He should have been shivering in fear, but the rush of adrenaline or whatever it was was still with him. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears as he held out the keys in his left hand, well out so Roark would have to move.

Teddy shuffled forward and the picture became clear in the little triangle of glass. He took a deep breath, and shifted his weight, moving his foot just a little. The moment crystallized in his mind's eye, and he put the plan into motion before he could chicken out. Chuck dropped the keys when Roark's hand was still out of line to catch them. Teddy lurched forward, risking his balance to try for the keys. They bounced off his fingertips and jangled on the concrete.

The tableau held for another half-second, as Roark opened his mouth to demand Chuck pick up the keys, or something. He never found out what.

Chuck let his right leg collapse under him, spinning as he fell and bringing the gun around. His hands met on the grips and he could see the shock on Roark's face, the tension in his forearm as he squeezed the trigger. It was a long, double action pull, and it came by reflex, not well aimed. The shot went high, grazing Chuck's scalp.

Chuck's finger convulsed on the trigger of his pistol. Roark's second shot was better, and Chuck felt something punch him in the left chest even as he loosed a handful of shots that crumpled Roark to the ground like a puppet with its strings suddenly and irrevocably cut.

Chuck collapsed back into the door of the sedan, with one hand already clapped over the scalp wound. He clutched at the pain in his chest and looked at his hand, covered in blood. He gasped for breath and his vision doubled. He shook his head to try to clear it and a wave of dizziness washed over him, followed quickly by darkness.

* * *

><p>Heaven was nice, Chuck decided, but it wasn't <em>heaven<em>nice, if that made any sense. He was comfortable, sure, but the fluffy clouds felt entirely too much like a mattress, and not, you know, angel feathers or something. Also, he reflected after a while, that his chest hurt, and his scalp hurt, and he would have thought that saint peter would have taken care of those sort of things on the way in. Also it was very dark. Voices intruded on the darkness, and Chuck recognized them. It seemed obvious now that he would have to face the facts. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut. "I'm not dead, am I?"

"NO!" A gruff voice answered. "Would you like to be?"

Chuck levered himself up on his elbows and opened his eyes. He had to squint from the lights and shade his eyes with one hand. They were back in his hotel room, and Secretary/Major Casey was glaring at him. "Not particularly, no," Chuck said. "It just comes as something of a shock. I distinctly remember getting shot in or around the heart-al region."

"Yeah," Sarah said, and Chuck blinked and stared at her for a moment, thankful that she'd come through unscathed. He winced when his ribs twinged. She was sitting next to him, with her feet tucked under her and the case tucked under one arm. "I think your phone has had it, though." She passed him the remains of the gadget; the screen had a quite obvious bullet hole in it, and the bullet had put a nearly inch-deep dent in the outer casing.

Chuck managed a grin. "Guess it's a good thing I'm such a nerd," he finally said. "Ellie thought I was crazy to bullet-proof my phone."

Bryce let out a laugh, and Chuck turned. He was slow catching up, it seemed, taking in his surroundings, but he was glad to spot Bryce and Sarah's dad sitting at the table playing cards. His leg was wrapped from the thigh all the way down to his ankle. "Is that... duct tape?"

"A thousand and one uses, Chuck," Bryce said. "This is only number three oh six. There's a master list someplace."

Chuck managed a weak laugh, and clutched at ribs that were bruised and tender despite his cellphone stopping the bullet. "Yeah," he said when he'd gotten over the discomfort. He fiddled with the ruined cell phone for a moment, before he set it aside, and let Sarah help him to a sitting position.

"So, everybody got out okay? Stating the obvious, I know. But I thought I heard a police siren there at the end."

"Yes," Casey said. "Walker and her dad and me got you and Larkin loaded in the van and got out of there just before the cops showed up. It's still on the news, if you're interested. CNN can't decide who to blame yet. Local cops are calling it a gangland slaying. Or the Philippine equivalent."

"Any of Roark's men make it out?"

"We don't believe so." Casey said. "It's all over but the paperwork, for me. Since you killed Roark."

"Oh, hell," Chuck said. "I killed my boss. It's not at all like in that movie."

"What movie?"

"I don't know. I don't get out to a lot of movies. It was like throw mama from the train, but with their bosses. I can't remember-"

"Cram it!" Casey said. "Okay, Walker. We waited until your boyfriend woke up, like you said. Now hand over the case."

"Well..." Sarah said. "About that. There's the matter of my-our- me and Chuck's, money. That'll be 450 million dollars please. I'll take a check."

Casey turned beet red and Bryce's head turned so fast he nearly fell out of his chair. "What!"

Chuck fought back a grin and watched her work.

Jack was just as perplexed as the two spies.

"You said yourself, Bryce. The... contents of this case are worth roughly three billion dollars. International salvage law entitles the recovering party to 15% of the value of property recovered from the sea floor. Comes out to 450 million in this case."

"That's my girl," Jack laughed.

"What?" Casey demanded.

"_We_ recovered it," Bryce said. "Casey and I recovered it from Roark at the warehouse!"

"To be fair," Sarah said. "You helped _us_ recover stolen property _after _we salvaged it and it was stolen by pirates. And Chuck was the one who chased down Roark. They'd have to decide it in court. Or, alternatively, you can give my dad the cost of a replacement boat for the one that sank, and one million dollars each for me and Chuck and we won't sue."

"What am I, chopped liver?" Jack complained.

"You're getting a replacement boat," Sarah said. "Take what you can get."

"Don't count your chickens before they've hatched, Walker. I haven't agreed to any of this," Casey growled. "What's to stop me from just taking the case away from you, huh?"

"Well," Sarah said. "Funny you should ask. Chuck mentioned, in passing, how this case has an anti-tamper device. If someone were to say, put in the incorrect code five times running while nobody was watching, bye bye thingamajiggy inside."

"Oh, hell."

"A push of this button, and nobody goes home happy," Sarah said, finger poised over the enter key.

"That's blackmail," Bryce said.

"Technically that's extortion," Jack said with an expansive wave of his hand. He looked at his cards and grinned. "Gin, by the way."

"And it's really more of a gray area if you want to get into it, since we're entitled to much more than we're asking," Chuck said.

Jack grinned and gave Chuck a nod of acknowledgment before he went on. "Now _b__lackmail_ would be me telling you how if you didn't pay we would go to the press with this whole situation. A few Philippine citizens died in addition to the head of a major US tech firm, all at the hands of United States intelligence officers, or their proxies. That could maybe start an international incident if it hit the newsstands. Better if this stays secret, don't you think?" He grinned like a cat.

"Ugh, fine," Bryce said. "Let me call my deputy director."

"Hey," Casey said. "The NSA still hasn't signed off on this deal."

"Then, in that case, John," Bryce said. "The CIA will be keeping the-" he glanced at Jack for a moment, who _hadn__'__t_been read in, "Thingamajiggy all to itself."

Casey grumbled for the entire two hours it took to get the funds transferred from the CIA's discretionary fund. He stormed off with the case holding the Cypher as soon as the transfers were complete.

Bryce lingered for a while after, and finally just bit the bullet. "Uh. In light of your meritorious service," he rummaged in his pockets and came out with a pair of business cards that read, simply:

_**Langston **__**Graham**_

_**Director**_

_**Central**__** Intelligence **__**Agency**_

"If either of you decide you want a change of careers."

Chuck goggled at the card for a moment and shook his head, still overwhelmed first and foremost by the whole not being dead thing, followed closely by his newfound financial independence. A distant third was a job offer at CIA.

Sarah grinned and shook her head. "We'll think about it."

Bryce nodded and, with some help from Jack got to his feet and hobbled out on a pair of crutches. "Gotta get going. I'm hitching a ride back to Guam on a military jet. Sorry I got you caught up in all this, Chuck."

The door closed behind him, and Jack Walker frowned at Chuck and Sarah. "Well," he said. "I've got a plane to catch too."

"What about your replacement boat?" Chuck said.

Jack shrugged. "Oddly enough, the cost of a new boat is almost identical to the amount of money it'll take to get the Armenians off my back for good. Funny how that worked out, eh kiddo?"

Sarah grinned. "Yes. Funny."

Jack shook his head. "Almost like you planned it that way."

"Almost," Chuck said.

Jack grinned and shook Chuck's hand. "You treat my little girl right," he said while fixing Chuck with a steady glare.

Sarah rolled her eyes and got up from the bed to walk/shove him to the door. "Will you be okay getting to the airport on your own?" she said. "Last time you tried, you wound up in a warehouse with a bag over your head."

"I'm supposed to be the one protects you, kiddo."

Sarah waved Graham's business card and lowered her voice. "This is the second time I've turned down the CIA, remember. Maybe I can take care of myself after all?"

"Sorry, Darlin," he said. "Fatherly prerogative. You're never too old for worrying."

"Ugh," Sarah said. "Fine. I'll get you my new number when I get to LA."

He darted a glance at Chuck, who had lapsed into what looked like unconsciousness. "He's still a schnook."

Sarah arched an eyebrow. "He's my schnook now. So lay off him."

Jack shook his head, but grinned and hugged her and whistled a jaunty tune to himself as he walked to the elevators.

"So," Chuck said when Sarah came back to bed. "Would it be in bad taste to order more room service?"

"If we used your expense account, definitely," she said and snuggled in next to him, careful not to jostle his tender ribs too much. "But, I recently came into a little money."

"Hmm," Chuck said. "So I'm to be your kept man, then?"

"Well... maybe," Sarah said. "You'd have to put out more."

"Give me a break, I'm wounded here."

She turned in his arms enough that he could catch the mischievous glint in her eye. "Let me kiss it and make it better."

* * *

><p><strong>Epilogue:<strong>

**Burbank Buy More**

**Three Months Later  
><strong>

Chuck could hardly believe the turn his life had taken. Three months ago, he'd been relatively happy, working himself near to exhaustion, but at least it had been respectable work. Here he was now, working at a Buy More like he had straight out of high school to help Ellie with the rent after their father split.

The million dollar payout Sarah had talked the CIA into had gone straight into his business startup. Which wasn't dead, just... hibernating. He had underestimated the costs of actually operating the business and needed to work long hours at a second job just to keep Bartowski Softworks in the black.

The fall of Roark Instruments was still ongoing, with TV coverage of the court cases supposed to last for another six months. Roark's personal journals had turned up after the man's death, detailing both his own dirty dealings and those of dozens of others he'd been in contact with. Chuck figured that was this 'FULCRUM' he remembered Bryce talking about briefly, but the TV news was calling them 'The Network'.

He'd tried to find work at another software company, or something, anything really other than making a barely livable wage at the buy more. But it seemed like someone was conspiring against him. He'd figured staying on at RI would be in poor taste, having shot the CEO to death in the Philippines, but he was fairly sure the rest of the company didn't know about that. He had a nagging suspicion maybe the CIA was sabotaging him, trying to nudge him toward taking the job offer. But that was probably just a combination of paranoia and dead-end job talking.

Sarah was the bright spot, though her enrollment in the Marine Biology department at UCLA had sent shivers through his Stanford-loving heart, she was doing something she loved, and that was what was important. "Yes," Chuck said, "I'll hold."

"Hey, Chuck," Morgan said. It was just weird and a little sad that Morgan had never risen above the rank of Green Shirt. Chuck had only been back at the Buy More for three months and they'd already promoted him twice, to Nerd Herd Supervisor, and now there was talk around the store that Big Mike wanted him to step up to Assistant Manager. "Did you see Fringe last night?"

"No, I was out with Sarah last night," Chuck said, digging for the customer file he was looking for. He checked his work absently. "No spoilers. Yes, I'm still holding."

"Stop the presses," Morgan said. "Who is that? Vicki Vale."

"Huh?" Chuck glanced up from his folder. "Oh, hey Sarah. Morgan, you remember I told you about Sarah, my girlfriend."

"Wha..." Morgan said. The gears of his brain grinding to a halt were nearly audible. "You didn't say she was... hah..."

Sarah leaned over the desk and gave Chuck a peck on the cheek. "Chuck's told me all about you," Sarah said.

"Nothing good, I hope," Morgan said. "I mean- wait. I did that wrong. Um, Chuck, help?"

"Don't mind him," Chuck said. "Carnival freaks found him in a dumpster as a child."

"But they raised me as one of their own," Morgan said, becoming slowly more dejected as he spoke. "I'll just, um. See you two later."

Sarah shook her head at Morgan's departing back. "Well, that was entertaining. What did you tell him about me?"

"Oh, you know. Dead shot with a spear-gun, scuba diving instructor. I may have glossed over a couple of... surface level details."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Because you wanted to see his head explode when I visited you at work?"

Chuck shrugged. "Guilty as charged, take me away. No really, take me away from this place?"

"Well," Sarah said. "My coursework is done for the semester, and a friend of mine has got a line on a dutch schooner that sunk off the coast of Florida in 1742. Supposed to be full of stolen Spanish gold. But... we'd have to be at the airport in twenty minutes, and I didn't want to speak for you."

Chuck considered for all of a second before letting the phone fall from where he had it pressed between his head and shoulder. "You're driving," he said and vaulted over the counter. "Big Mike! I quit!"

THE END

* * *

><p>AN: Happy turkey day. This AU is now complete. Time to get Frontier finished.


End file.
